Design Thinking (Slow Design)
OK so it's dead because everyone is doing it. But it comes alive again when you revisit old books on the subject, or observing older designs in the environment, such as in architecture.
In a lecture by artist James Turrell, he talked about his study of perceptual psychology in his early career. This piqued my interest, and out of curiosity I looked for books on the subject. There is one book directly on point: Perceptual Psychology: A Humanistic Approach to the Study of Persons, published in 1976. I searched it on Goodreads and interestingly, no one had yet added this book to their reading list. I perused it at the library, and found it to be a useful reference book on design. There are probably lots of obscure books such as this that offer new insights, written long before we started designing interfaces for computer screens.
Books aren't the only touchstones. Simply being mindful and observant is the best design teacher. The paradox now is that experience design is so fraught with potential for distraction. There is something in design that wants to be laconic and laid-back, and you have to spend time in libraries looking at all the (slower-paced) non-digitized information.
If you live in an older city with many layers in its architecture, you realize design typologies took a long time to develop. We are beginning to see this on the Internet, partly the result of advocating typology as opposed to free-form design. The primary difference is that one quickly supplants the other on the Internet, with flat design paving over skeuomorphic design for example. Architectural layers tend to remain visible, or are sometimes given facelifts ("facadectomies").
The corollary in urban design is the street with no sidewalk, or buildings with blank walls that face the street with no front entrance. Jane Jacobs held the belief that the urban fabric would be self-sustaining when all eyes were on the street. Now there are no eyes on the street but rather on the road, so it is not necessary to design spaces where no one is looking. The driver is now the primary user, not pedestrians. The only windows are auto glass, and perhaps in the future AR displays, all the more reason to build blank walls to serve as projection screens. (Self-driving cars may change this over time, allowing us to look at the environment more, and consequently put more emphasis on making great design.) The built environment is what it is in many ways directly as the result of driving. Why bother with architecture when eyes are on the road? All you want are large signs visible through a windshield (or AR displays in the future).
To the extent that design is an art, design will be less rarefied. Without constraints (and typology) design is art, and is therefore more free-form in nature. Per Augustus Pugin, the 19th-Century designer of the Palace of Westminster, "decorate construction but never construct decoration." Pugin was ultimately known as a designer of decoration, not an architect. He realized that decoration (read: art) was separate from the rigors of engineering and design.
Many people would like to design their own house, but what architect would quietly follow whatever the client thought was the best design solution, in conflict with the constraints of engineering and typology and the needs of the community? To design is not to arrogate, but rather to synthesize a body of knowledge and experience. But such a client can also be in the role of the artist (read: developer), in which the designer is more in the role of an artisan.
Where art, design, sculpture and architecture meet is a very exciting place, but not necessarily one that is so fast that it misses opportunities for closer observation.
In a lecture by artist James Turrell, he talked about his study of perceptual psychology in his early career. This piqued my interest, and out of curiosity I looked for books on the subject. There is one book directly on point: Perceptual Psychology: A Humanistic Approach to the Study of Persons, published in 1976. I searched it on Goodreads and interestingly, no one had yet added this book to their reading list. I perused it at the library, and found it to be a useful reference book on design. There are probably lots of obscure books such as this that offer new insights, written long before we started designing interfaces for computer screens.
Books aren't the only touchstones. Simply being mindful and observant is the best design teacher. The paradox now is that experience design is so fraught with potential for distraction. There is something in design that wants to be laconic and laid-back, and you have to spend time in libraries looking at all the (slower-paced) non-digitized information.
If you live in an older city with many layers in its architecture, you realize design typologies took a long time to develop. We are beginning to see this on the Internet, partly the result of advocating typology as opposed to free-form design. The primary difference is that one quickly supplants the other on the Internet, with flat design paving over skeuomorphic design for example. Architectural layers tend to remain visible, or are sometimes given facelifts ("facadectomies").
The corollary in urban design is the street with no sidewalk, or buildings with blank walls that face the street with no front entrance. Jane Jacobs held the belief that the urban fabric would be self-sustaining when all eyes were on the street. Now there are no eyes on the street but rather on the road, so it is not necessary to design spaces where no one is looking. The driver is now the primary user, not pedestrians. The only windows are auto glass, and perhaps in the future AR displays, all the more reason to build blank walls to serve as projection screens. (Self-driving cars may change this over time, allowing us to look at the environment more, and consequently put more emphasis on making great design.) The built environment is what it is in many ways directly as the result of driving. Why bother with architecture when eyes are on the road? All you want are large signs visible through a windshield (or AR displays in the future).
To the extent that design is an art, design will be less rarefied. Without constraints (and typology) design is art, and is therefore more free-form in nature. Per Augustus Pugin, the 19th-Century designer of the Palace of Westminster, "decorate construction but never construct decoration." Pugin was ultimately known as a designer of decoration, not an architect. He realized that decoration (read: art) was separate from the rigors of engineering and design.
Many people would like to design their own house, but what architect would quietly follow whatever the client thought was the best design solution, in conflict with the constraints of engineering and typology and the needs of the community? To design is not to arrogate, but rather to synthesize a body of knowledge and experience. But such a client can also be in the role of the artist (read: developer), in which the designer is more in the role of an artisan.
Where art, design, sculpture and architecture meet is a very exciting place, but not necessarily one that is so fast that it misses opportunities for closer observation.
