DESIGNING *for humans

ZIBA's Ethnographic Design Research in China

Businessweek's Innovation quarterly recently featured an article describing the ethnographic methods used by ZIBA to understand the Chinese laptop market for Lenovo.  The process included various techniques including deep cultural immersion, interviews, profiling and method acting.

IDSA Conference - Sound Quality and Noise Presentation

Attached is David Bowen's presentation on sound quality from the IDSA national conference session on Sound in Product Design. 

Download SoundInProductDesign.pdf

You may contact David at [email protected]

Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Award

New York's Cooper-Hewitt museum has a number of design events going on:

• People's Design Award - You can view, nominate and vote (although it doesn't count) for your choice for the annual award.  Frankly, the site itself is poorly designed: it's not clear that there are many more award nominees than then six visible on the home page, and there's no place for a collective list. Still a nice summary of great designs from the past and present.
• National Design Week - October 15-21 2006 is National Design week, with free admission to the museum.  This week will include the announcement of the National Design Award winners.
• National Design Triennial - From December 2006 though July 2007, the museum will host "experimental designs and emerging ideas—including animation, new media, and fashion, robotics, architecture, product, medical, and graphic design—at the center of American culture from 2003 to 2006."

IDSA Conference - Bats in Austin

For those of you who weren't able to join us in Austin, you also missed the opportunity to see the daily dusk-time ritual of about a million bats flying out from a city bridge overpass into the night.  Apologies for the poor camera phone quality, 

You can follow the arc of the bats from the lower right of the photo, counter-clockwise up towards the center of the photo.

(Click photo to enlarge.)

Ergonomics Expo in November

IDSA and Human Factors will be represented at the National Ergonomics Conference and Exposition, which takes place Nov. 28- Dec 1 in Las Vegas, Nevada:

• Stephen Wilcox, PhD, FIDSA, chair of the IDSA Human Factors section, will be offering a course on Where Human Factors is Today in Product Development
  
• Ronald Kemnitzer, FIDSA, and current president of the IDSA, will be offering a course on Humanizing Human Factors for the Aging Population
  
• Mark Dziersk, IDSA, executive editor of IDSA's Innovation Magazine will be presenting Ergonomics & the “Wow” Factor in Product Design
  
• Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, will be discussing - "What Do They Want?" Integrating Ergonomics for Successful Design Innovation

The Laws of Simplicity

John Maeda's new book, The Laws of Simplicity, is essentially a set of ten associated essays on principles of design.  While the goals and concept of the book are reasonable, it is flawed in its execution by two factors: lack of tangibility and, frankly, silly word games.

Each of Maeda's chapters covers a particular principle that should be applied when designing to achieve simplicity.  For example, Reduce (e.g. reduce extraneous features and ornaments) and Organize (e.g. categorize information into related groupings).  These happen to be the most straightforward of the ten principles.  I'd be hard pressed to give you a succinct, actionable definition of some of the other principles, such as Differences or The One.  Perhaps Maeda is going from the concrete to the abstract as he presents his sequence of principles - if that is the case, it is not explained.

Maeda rarely provides tangible examples of where and how these principles have been applied.  A notable exception is a dot-cluster diagram (worth looking at) that illustrates the variations in control placement across the evolution of the Apple iPod controls.  It would have been useful if that technique was discussed in more detail and applied to more examples.  Unfortunately, space for meaningful content was limited given the compactness of the 100 page book.  Maedea refers the reader to forthcoming examples on the companion Web site.

Which leads me to the other flaw of the book - there is a great deal of text and time (both the author's and readers') on word games and acronyms.  For example:

"...I had the simple observation that the letters "M", "I" and "T"-the letters by which my university is known - occur in natural sequence in the word SIMPLICITY.  In fact, the same can be said of the word COMPLEXITY."

Yes, that is a simple observation - but one worth noting?  Especially in a book of 100 pages that espouses the principle to Reduce?  Other verbal devices include a set of acronyms for remembering subcomponents of the key principles.  Certainly acronyms are an effective mnemonic, but in this case (SHE, HER, BRAIN), I'm not sure if the information contained within the acronyms is worth remembering.  For example, Madea's acronym for learning (BRAIN):

• BASICS are the beginning
• REPEAT yourself often
• AVOID creating desperation
• INSPIRE with examples
• NEVER forget to repeat yourself

As a usability practitioner I certainly appreciate the value of Maeda's contribution, but I struggle with how to classify this book.  It's meandering, stream of consciousness style, lends itself more to a philosophical monologue, rather than a educational tool on the meaning and value of simplicity.  For the more results-oriented reader, I strongly recommend Universal Principles of Design - in both is content and format it truly embodies simplicity, rather than just paying it lip service.

-Rob Tannen