Design thinking is a frustrating topic for strangers to the subject. It is not a concrete process for creating innovation; there is no instruction manual for design. You can learn to rules for research or color theory and typography, but you really only learn design by doing it. Design thinking doesn’t just require you to do things a different way it requires a new way of thinking, this is what makes it so hard to grasp, it’s a fundamental shift from the traditional mode of business thinking. Tim Brown gets over this hurdle with a lot of case studies, to put you in the mindset of doing. IDEO comes up a lot in the book. This is a source of frustration for many people but the fact is not many people do it better than the fine folks at IDEO, and showing you the thought process behind their work gives you glimpse into how they were thinking.

This book is clearly a primer on design thinking, it has a lot of information in it but requires a close read to pick it up. It may be heavy on the IDEO promotion, but again I think there is a purpose to that, revealing many insights in to the way IDEO works and thinks. So bottom line, this may not be required reading for those versed in design thinking, but it is a nice refresher. It should be required for design students if only to show them a world outside of posters, something many programs don’t do well.

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
by: Tim Brown
publisher: HarperBusiness (September 29, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0061766089
ISBN-13: 978-0061766084
hardcover: 272 pages

Crown Hall By Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Let me preface this by saying I want the next touchscreen phone, camera, video player, Swiss-army knife as much as the next guy (maybe more, I don’t like the one I have). But for the past I don’t know how long, simplicity has been a rallying cry expertly advocated by John Maeda in his book  The Laws of Simplicity. These rules are embodied in numerous web apps 37 Signals wonderful Basecamp, Twitter, Flickr, and thousands of others. They intentionally limit the offerings of the program, instead continually evolving and improving their chosen set of features. So far this ethos clearly hasn’t moved into the featuritis driven desktop software market, I’m looking at you Adobe.

I think it’s safe to say that the old Mies Van Der Rohe truism “less is more” has never really applied to technology products. Much like in software the common competitive strategy has been adding more features to an existing product to one-up your competitors. But if you look around there seems to be some hints at change in places like the netbook world. For the unacquainted netbooks are less powerful smaller laptops, not because they are the low-end cheap versions of their more powerful cousins, but because they have a different utility. The mode of thought that produced the netbook said that the majority of laptop users only need a word processor/spreadsheet application, a browser for the internet and sometimes an email client. So what is important is internet access, portability and battery life, not processor power. The major front runners compete on these basic attributes. Simple. Along the same lines is the the Kindle (although is a back light too much to ask) and other book readers which focus on doing a better job of allowing you to read. Most recently is the Canon PowerShot G11 which unlike competitors, forgoes megapixel count for improving image quality.

Of course it makes sense for some products to do everything ion the world I like my phone being an Mp3 player and a camera it’s less to carry around with me. Then again perhaps a phone is no longer a phone, but a completely new device with a new feature set? I think the take away is, do what you do well and don’t offer additional features unless they are in themselves a full solution. I know that at the end of the day I prefer my eReader to be a better book, and I prefer my software to do a good job of what I purchased it for. I wouldn’t use a hammer instead of a saw to cut a piece of wood even though it’s capable.

This is not a book about environmentalism. It will not tell you to use soy ink and CFLs to make your studio green. This is a book about sustainability, a distinction of utmost importance.

This distinction takes us down the road of environmentalism but also brings along it’s siblings social and financial change. These tag-alongs are necessary because if real solutions are to take hold it’s not good enough to find the “most green” alternative. The questions of product life cycle, usability/adaptability and marketability have to be asked. Is an alternative really better if it contributes to another problem by virtue of its source materials, or no one can use it, or if no one will buy it? These questions are addressed in this book, alongside how to sell them to the people writing the checks. This gives this book the distinction of advocating practicality and sustainability (even if they are one and the same).

Nathan Shedroff, is chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. So it is no surprise that this is one of the most practical books on implementing sustainability into business practices out there. It focuses on making your existing processes, products and services more sustainable, certainly there is a encyclopedic gathering of environmental frameworks, but the real genius of this book is the focus on integrating these with what already exists.

If I have any complaints it’s one of the complaints I have about a many of the books from Rosenfeld Media. The pasion that marks the introduction and conclusion of the book seems to be missing from much of what is in-between. I’m not sure why, but this seems to be a characteristic from this publisher. The exhaustive amount information may have something to do with it as well as the separation of real-world examples from the main text through the use of side bars. But this does leave you with a feeling of wanting more, and not in a good way.

It’s hard to accept any thing other than the ideal solution, but experience tells us the opportunities to completely throw something out and start from scratch are rare. One of the real takeaways from this book is not only that design has helped to create the problem, but by actively railing against producers design has not helped the problem. William McDonough and Michael Braungart say we shouldn’t settle for the least harmful alternative, and they are right. But we still need to work with producers to make change, Design is the Problem gets this.

Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable
by Nathan Shedroff
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; 1ST edition (2009)
ISBN-10: 1933820004
ISBN-13: 978-1933820002
Pages: 352

U of M ICON House

The annual U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a “competition to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house”. Twenty universities from around the world are competing to help determine the future of sustainable housing.

Most of the houses meet the second requirement, they run on solar power during the day and either store the power or put it back in the grid. All are energy efficient. It’s the first requirement that is the real obstacle for adoption. For solar houses to be widely adopted people have to like living in them. Aesthetics in this type of competition usually take back seat to engineering.

The University of Minnesota renowned for it’s solar car program is tackling not only the engineering problems but the aesthetic ones as well. They are designing a gable roofed house that is “influenced by traditions that surround us daily. Our love for using what already exists has lead us to take the concept of a gable roof and ‘solarize’ it!” More on their sites here, and here. This integration of design at the beginning of an engineering project is a step in the right direction for adoption of alternative energies.

More of a sideways relation to information design. Smashing Magazine has a nice article on advertising in web design, an issue I’m currently wrestling with. Integrating advertising is a crucial role in the design of the webpage if you want to make a page that makes you and your clients happy. Every-time I deal with this issue my mind begins to wander to other possible revenue streams for websites. Surely someone has to be able to come up with a better money making model than flash animations … anyone? (the newspapers will thank you)

Ever four years (yes I know they’ll start on the new one in about a week) elections enter our lives bringing with them many things including constant tv, radio, newspaper ads and bitter family debates. Most of the election baggage is annoying but for designers there is one huge bonus, a slew of beautiful well thought out infographics. Oh beautiful infographics, ever need inspiration?, look no further. These sets of complex and dense sets of data are beautiful when done well and nauseating when not. The rise of the interactivity of the web has the ability to take infographics to eleven. While the presidential election is finally the graphics are still being pumped out for retrospective views or ongoing races/recounts (someday MN will have a senator). Below is a list of nice graphics I’ve come across this time around.

New York Times: Always a source of inspiration they’ve had some particularily good ones this year.

New York Times Election Results Page

Obama Speech, McCain Speech

Electoral Shifts

Milestones of Barack Obama

Milestone of John McCain

Dissecting the Changing Electorate

you can go here for more from the New York Times

Washington Post:

this one is really detailed Election Winners by County

Good: While not always non-partisan their graphics are always good.

The First 100 Days: Time line of the first 100 days of every president since FDR.

Voters Guide

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Again this is just a short list of the good info design that we’ve been treated to. if you know of others post them in the comments to share with all. Here’s to the next four years.

The design of ballots has become one of the most famous examples of design’s impact on the world. Since the butterfly ballot, there has been much talk of improving the ballots, but little progress. This year’s ballots in North Carolina are not much better. The question I have is when are they going to let someone fix these? More on ballot design from the AIGA, Brennan Center For Justice, and more on the North Carolina Ballots here from the New York Times.

Jonathan Harris is a story teller. In the tradition of the best story tellers he uncovers glimpses of life, and allows you to reconstruct the rest. You can hear him speak about his work at TED Dec 2007 here or here. His now old project We Feel Fine or his more recent The Whale Hunt are beautiful examples of information design. The different ways in which he handles data, whether it is the data points emulating the weather or using metadata to create a timeline, are both engaging and beautiful.

But while inspiring, this is not the most important lesson of his work. The important aspect of his work is the reminder that good information design goes farther than aesthetics and readability. Good information design engages it’s audience with a story.

This blog tends to focus on the online world, not because there is a preference but because it’s the medium that gives us our voice. The longer I spend in the online world the more I am amazed by it’s similarity to the more traditional offline world. Compare the flow diagramming of a way finding system to that of an IAs wire frame and you’ll see this point proven.

Design Work Plan design blog, has a nice article on wayfinding systems. Something that is often overlooked, until your trying to find out where your supposed to be at say an airport (O’Hare anybody?) They give a nice quick set of guidelines and accompany it with plenty of tasty pictures. This conveniently comes out when I am just at the begining of helping to create a new wayfinding system. As an added bonus they include a link to some arrow vectors, so head on over and take a look.

The See Conference is a conference on information design, from their website: “Our world is growing increasingly complex, dynamic and multi-dimensional. And so is our communication. The see conference is dedicated to new approaches that are being developed in the fields of design, art, architecture, multimedia and economy to confront this complexity and to transform the immense flood of information into useable knowledge.” Additionally they have posted videos from the mot recent conference in April. So head on over and learn something.