"The most outstanding design is that which is perfectly appropriate to what is trying to be accomplished."

The Ferrari 355 F1 has a clutch but no clutch pedal. A computer changes gears, using data downloaded from Michael Schumacher's Formula One races. Floor it and you experience Michael's greatest hits -- shocking, slamming shifts that expand one's sense of the possible.

 "Design is one of the few tools that for every (dollar) you spend, you actually say something about your business." -- Raymond Turner, exec, BAA

The Design Dimension, Product Strategy & The Challenge of Global Marketing, Christoper Lorenz, 1986

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Design Principles John Thackara recently unveiled 10 "Articles of Association Between Design, Technology, and the People Formerly Known as Users." The principles are meant to capture his reservations about the rush to build a world of pervasive computing and to challenge designers to think differently about their priorities. Here are some of our favorites.

Article 1: We cherish the fact that people are innately curious, playful, and creative. Therefore, we suspect that technology will not go away: It's too much fun.

Article 2: We will deliver value to people -- and won't deliver people to systems. We will give priority to human agency, and we will not treat humans as "factors" in some bigger picture.

Article 3: We will not presume to design experiences for people -- but we will do so with them, if asked.

Article 4: We do not believe in "idiot-proof" technology -- because we are not idiots, and neither are you. We will use language with care, and will search for words that are less patronizing than "user" or "consumer."

Article 8: We will not pretend that things are simple when they are complex. We believe that, by acting within a system, you will probably improve it.

Article 9: We believe that place matters, and we will look after your place.

Article 10: We believe that both speed and time matter too -- but that sometimes you need more of one, and sometimes you need less. We will not fill up time with content.

Fast Company

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Shaker Design Guidelines

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from Donald A. Norman,

The Psychology of Everyday Things

            keys to good design:

            1.         provide a good conceptual model

            2.         make things visible

            3.         good mapping

            4.         feedback

            reminder is (1) a signal and (2) a message.  (use different signals with different messages....)

           why designers go astray:

            1.         aesthetics put first

            2.         they're not typical users

            principles for design: 

           1. use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head

design model <-> system image <-> user's model

"In the best of worlds, the manuals would be written first, then the design would follow the manual.

            2.  simplify the structure of tasks

                        exploit natural mappings.  make sure that the user can determine the relationships: between intentions and possible actions, between actions and their effects on the system, between actual system state and what is perceivable by sing/sound/feel, between the perceived system state and the needs, intentions and expectations of the users

            5.         exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial

            6.         design for error (Murphy's always there)

            7.         when all else fails, standardize

The nice thing about standardization is that no matter how arbitrary the standardized mechanism, it has to be learned only once.  People can learn it and use it effectively.

Remember, standardization is essential only when all the necessary information cannot be placed in the world or when natural mappings cannot be exploited.  The role of training and practice is to make the mappings and required actions more available to the user, overcoming any shortcomings in the design, minimizing the need for planning and problem solving.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context--a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.--Eliel Saarinen

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ROBERT'S Rules of Software Design

from Robert B. Rossney

 

1)         Use Occam's Razor.  Corollary:  if the answer you find isn't an obvious one, keep looking until you find another non-obvious answer and compare the two.  One will be more right than the other.

 2)         If some aspect of your program gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, it needs to be rewritten or redesigned.  If it resists rewriting and redesign, it is probably unnecessary.  If it is necessary, there's probably something wrong with the program as a whole.  Good software doesn't make you queasy.

 3)         Don't surprise, constrain, confuse, mislead, or worst of all lie to the user.  Take the user seriously.  The unorthodox, spiteful, and just plain stupid things that users do would tax the patience of a saint, and they'll tax yours too, but think of what you'd do without them.

 4)         Any time you hear yourself saying "Oh, that'll never happen," give some serious thought to what your program should do when, not if, it (whatever it is) DOES happen.

 5)         Approach the hardest part of the design first.  Putting this off until later will only subject it to the constraints imposed by your solutions to the "easy parts" of the design.

 6)         Fight off constraints to your design as long as you possibly can.  The sooner you accept a constraint the more integral it will become to your design, and the greater the pain when the absolutely fixed immutable constraint has to change for the next revision.

 7)         Don't write anything down until your head is so full of ideas that it can't hold any more.  This will mitigate the natural tendency of ideas to vanish the moment you try to express them.  Don't code until you can't bear not coding.  Existing code is a design constraint.  (See 6.)

 8)         Always code as if you were writing the final, production version.  Develop standards and follow them.  The most brilliant programmer on earth is nothing but a menace if s/he doesn't follow standards.

 9)         Comment your code so that a drooling idiot could understand what you're doing.  Someday that drooling idiot will be you.  (See 10.)  For some reason programmers document the obvious and leave the kludge unspoiled by explanation.

 10)      Do not disdain the simple, nor exalt the clever.  Simplicity is often a blessing.  On the other hand, whenever you're tempted into cleverness, imagine yourself sitting behind the keyboard staring blankly into the screen at three in the morning trying to figure out just what you meant by that.

 11)      For Christ's sake, pay attention.  When you can't explain your neat new feature to the marketing people, when the users at the beta site ask you the stupidest questions imaginable, when a byte or two of garbage appears in the lower right-hand corner of the screen every hundredth time you use an option, the universal mind-consciousness is trying to tell you something.  Don't ignore it.

 

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design is not merely an indicator of esthetic taste, but a social phenomenon that both mirrors and shapes how we think. Whereas objects of art reflect the personal vision of their makers, manufactured goods - which are designed to be salable and profitable - tend to embody more generalized beliefs about society, and so ''can cast ideas about who we are and how we should behave into permanent and tangible forms.'' Modern office equipment in ''bright colours and slightly humorous shapes,'' for instance, can help perpetuate the myth that office work is fun; just as modern, streamlined kitchen appliances can underline the contemporary faith in progress and technological salvation.

Taking issue with the aphorism ''form follows function,'' Mr. Forty suggests that manufactured goods have varied markedly in appearance over the years ''because of the circumstances of their production and consumption,'' that design's ''disguising, concealing and transforming powers have been essential to the progress of modern industrial societies.'' He goes on to argue, in fact, that industrial design has consistently employed three basic approaches: the archaic, in which references to the past (antique-like cabinets) are used to overcome consumers' resistence to innovation; the suppressive, in which the object itself in entirely costumed or hidden (incorporating a radio in an armchair); and the Utopian, in which futuristic imagery is employed to play upon the customer's yearning for the new and better (making computer terminals look like space age machines).

SOURCE

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American expertise: building dreams

From the WSJ 7-27-92:

The Cold War is won. Individual liberty and American market capitalism sweep Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union. Mickey Mouse has invaded France. The world's largest McDonald's has opened in Beijing. So pervasive is American culture that a conference earlier this year at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, debated whether the whole world is "Americanizing," and concluded that, yes, it surely is.

"As much as we--and everyone else--assume that the French make the best perfumes, and the Swiss the finsest watches, the suspicion will continue that Americans make the best dreams," said Pico Iyer, a Time magazine contributing essayist.

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the Dark Side

From Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born, by Denise Shekerjian:

New things put a tremendous strain on old opinions. People are slow to change; the resistance to throwing out one's entire stock of old opinions is iron strong. The public is likely to appreciate something creative that stirs up, even cracks apart, the status quo only when they recognize some tiny part of their own agenda being championed. And if the timing is propitious and enough people appreciate some part of the new work, it will be deemed Good and will stand as a creative new contribution to the culture.

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Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is greater than quality control or testing.

Testing describes the use of tests for some purpose.

Quality control describes the process of measuring something against a standard of quality, with the result that anything that passes a quality control process is of a required level of quality.

Quality assurance describes a process that seeks to improve quality by increasing the standard of quality, the quality of what goes into the production process, and the quality of the components of the production process.

http://www.philosophe.com/themes.html