My Design Articles 2014

Designing a Creative Practice

For much of my life, I’ve taken a pretty haphazard attitude towards my own creativity. And while I’ve been mostly successful, I have long periods of creative block, as well as professional goals that have idled. I look back at envy at some of the most creatively-fertile periods of my life (2007-8 in particular) and I’ve realized there were activities I did every day that I should probably resume.

At the same time, for the last few months, I’ve been reading a number of books on creativity and forming creative habits. While many of these books have different, specific pieces of advice, I’ve collected the themes into a course of action for myself.

The UX of Commercial Drones, UX Magazine

Technology asks, “Can it be done?” Design asks, “Should it be done, and how?” I’ve thought about these questions frequently in the weeks following the 60 Minutes’ introduction of Amazon’s PrimeAir. While some were horrified by the prospect of commercial drones buzzing through the skies, I was amazed and intrigued at this vision of the future. But that’s all it is right now: a vision, and a somewhat crude one at that—one that leaves many questions unanswered.

Some of those questions are logistical and legal: Will this work and in what environments? What are the implications on a social level and where safety is concerned? These are all tremendously important questions, but let’s assume the issues surrounding them can be worked out. After all, there is plenty of money to be made (by Amazon and others like FedEx [and Google’s Project Wing]) by making it a reality. In fact, Ross McCullough, vice president of corporate strategy at UPS, recently said: “I believe these things will be part of the system in the future. I don’t know when.”

The Hidden Genius and Influence of The Traffic Light, Wired

See it sway: three-eyed blind bat hanging from a wire. Or perhaps there: perched atop a pole, lights moving from top to bottom–green yellow red green yellow red–in its unvarying sequence. Two hundred years ago, it would have been a wonder, something on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851, gawked at by Victorians. Today it’s seen but unconsidered, passed under a dozen times a day by most of us, influencing how we move, shaping our cities, warping how we travel, and occasionally, inadvertently, helping to kill us. Consider the traffic light.

The First Things on The Internet (of Things)

I was curious what the first non-traditional-computer objects were that were connected to a computer network. (A telegraph is probably the first device connected to any kind of network.) To be technical: a non-computer yet packet switched network device with continuous or frequent connectivity to said network.) Here’s some I found, stretching back 40 years.

Why We Need to Tame Our Algorithms Like Dogs, Wired

These coded aliens, these ghosts in the machines, are becoming even incomprehensible to their creators. With algorithms starting to take on oversight and control of our critical systems, we need to ensure that, like with dogs, we become comprehensible to them. If so, perhaps in the future we’ll think of them as Man’s Best Friend.

On Design Education, Medium

The crux of the matter is the feeling that many design schools are doing a disservice to their students by preparing them for careers they’re unlikely to have, at least right out of school. “No one wants to hire a 22-year-old strategist,” was how a colleague (perhaps indelicately) phrased it. Graduate schools focus on more and more specialized, baroque areas of design. Meanwhile, undergraduates are pointed towards areas like service and systems design, and social innovation, despite the fact that the job market for those is small. What most undergraduates in the design field will work on when they graduate are products: physical objects, printed materials, or (increasingly) hardware and software. Now certainly, most of these will be part of a service or system, and some (hopefully all) will have a benefit to society. And no one is arguing that an understanding of strategy, services and systems isn’t essential to understanding 21st century design. But too many graduates get out of school and become disillusioned when the work they’re doing is not at the system or service level, but at the product level, where their skills, at least initially, are needed the most. I’ve seen this first-hand.

Some Kind of Toaster, Medium

It wasn’t quite as bad for my father. By the time he was built in 2001, there were lots of things on the Internet: coffee pots, refrigerators, even toilets. Switching a toaster on — or even knowing if it was in use or not — was pretty trivial by then. People had gotten used to seeing objects online; it wasn’t quite the freakshow it was in grandpa’s time.

No, with Dad, connecting him had to be for something different, something interesting. It wasn’t enough that he was on the Internet — that he was present — but that he did something as well. Being online had to mean something. It had to be useful. So — get this — he told the weather.

The End of Design as We Know It, Medium

To many people this is a bleak, grim, oh-shit-there-goes-my-job, future. Which is understandable, because for many people this probably will be the end of their job unless they future-proof themselves. You future-proof yourself by ensuring that the kind of work you do cannot be easily replicated by an algorithm. In design, those skills are insights-gathering, problem framing, and crafting unconventional solutions.

The Wonderful Possibilities of Connecting Your Fridge to The Internet, Wired

Smart appliances humbly predict our needs and modestly adjust as little as possible to accommodate them. This sometimes requires connecting to the network for a better, bigger brain or to draw upon the collected intelligence of similar objects. You don’t need to stuff lots of processing power and memory into the object itself if it can use resources in the cloud. Imagine if your refrigerator could learn how to keep food cooler more cheaply by looking at the data from other refrigerators in the area? Collective machine intelligence and the benefits it could engender such as fixing model-specific problems and product efficiency are good reasons to enable network connectivity.

The Shelves Come to The Pickers, Medium

It could be that we’re finally seeing emerge what the late John Rheinfrank called “Adaptive Worlds”: products and environments that are smart enough to change their functionality, content, and even form based on the task and the person’s abilities. In this worldview, design isn’t human-centered (although humans are part of the system) but rather ability-centered: what are the capabilities of the people and products in the system and how can they react and supplement each other to perform activities.