DES 680 Digital Design

Designing Design

What Design Has Become

● The world's economy, and the designer's role within it, is radically changing.

● Effciency and aesthetics are no longer enough.

● Companies and societies will continue to prosper only if they push to higher grounds of Innovation.

Innovation:Imaginative activity fashioned to produce outcomes that are both original and of practical value.

* An activity designers naturally engage in!

Designers are uniquely positioned to lead

innovation, because they suggest that something may be and reach out to explore it.

Designers are: ● INTUITIVE ● EXPERIMENTAL● EMPATHETIC

A tool of innovation associated with design is

Brand Platform.

Brand Platform: the ideas, words, colors, textures,

sounds, animations, etc. from which later

decisions about a product or service may evolve.

www.nytimes.com

Connotation and Denotation in Design

Connotative:

Having the power of implying or suggesting

something in addition to what is explicit

Denotative:

Limited to the explicit meaning of a word or text; "a

literal translation"

Precisely and clearly expressed or readily

observable; leaving nothing to implication

Connotation and Denotation in Design from The Language of Advertising http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist34/Unit_03/connotation.htm

A simple sign has a signifer which denotes its signifed; at the

second level of connotation, this whole sign becomes a signifer for

another signifed.

Components of advertisements typically have connotations, which

connect the advertisement to a larger cultural context.

For example, think about the way that hair is portrayed in

advertisements for hair products: either immaculately styled, or free-

fowing and in motion. The styled image is used in advertisements

that connote (a woman, typically) getting herself ready to socialize;

the free-fowing image connotes freedom in life: freedom from

worries about hair, freedom to travel, freedom of expression.

Motion Design from Designing for Motion by Matt Woolman

“The desktop computer has transformed the design profession

profoundly over the past 25 years. Distinct stages of evolution are

marked by points at which the once quaint profession of commercial

art, or graphic design, has grown into something more complex, as

the designer has expanded into new skill sets and areas of creative

practice.”

The eighties - print production processes, such as page layout,

typesetting, and mechanical preparation, move from the domain of

specialists working in these areas and onto the desktop of the

designer’s workspace.

The early nineties - an explosion of typeface design was the result of

consumer access to technology.

Motion Design from Designing for Motion by Matt Woolman

The mid-nineties - the designer gained access to the tools for

creating and producing Web sites and moving type.

The new wave - motion graphics, or motion design.

Behind this new wave lies yet another technological evolution.

Design studios now have access to highly advanced yet affordable

hardware and software literally on their desktops. Both 2-D and 3-D

animation and video production are now possible “inhouse,” rather

than in specialized—and expensive—shops.

Motion Design from Designing for Motion by Matt Woolman

Motion-graphics design is not a single discipline. It is a convergence

of animation, illustration, graphic design, narrative flmmaking,

sculpture, and architecture, to name only a few. The word “graphic” is

important: this includes formal content that has a graphic emphasis

such as symbols, icons, and illustrated 2- and 3-D objects, often

synthesized with live action.

Goal-Directed Design (the Interactive Design process)

Make people happy and your products & services will be a success.

BUT why are so many digital products so diffcult and unpleasant to

use? Why aren't we all happy and successful? Imbuing creation with

humanity. Pure technologically focused solutions tend to fail.

Human oriented design activities:● Understanding audience/users' desires, needs, motivations and

contexts● Understanding business and technical opportunities,

requirements, and constraints● Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products

whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable, and

desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible.

The Goal-Directed Design ProcessDesign has become a limiting term in the technology industry. For many

developers and managers, the word has come to mean what happens in the third

process of the evolution of product design I.E. design provides a visual facelift ON

the implementation model (the representation of how a machine or program

actually works).

But design, when properly deployed both identifes user requirements and defnes

a detailed plan for the behavior and appearance of products – design provides

true PRODUCT DEFINITION.

Designers as researchers!

Current Model broken down into specialists

Market researchperformed by

market analysts and ethnographers

Design of formperformed by

graphic/UI and industrial designers

The Goal-Directed Design Process

Designers should not be isolated from users or audience. Designers

bring to the table empathy. Additionally, it is often diffcult for pure

researchers to know what research information they've gathered is

really important from a design perspective.

GOALS, NOT FEATURES, ARE THE KEY TO PRODUCT SUCCESS

Marketers often describe a product or service based on its features

and/or functions. However, this only provides limited insight in to

how human beings can be effective and happy when viewing, using

or interacting with a product or service.

Characteristics of Strategic Designersby Tom Klinkowstein

They are great Zoomers! The ability to engage in big picture thinking and yet still be details orientated

is what I like to call “Zooming”, and its people “Zoomers”. Strategic Designers have this ability to look at

situations or design problems from many different angles, think through different solutions, and fnally

reframe the answer at high and detailed levels. This reframing ability requires a lot of skill. The key

ingredient in reframing problems is the all-important ability to wear many hats and speak the many

different languages of business, marketing, design, engineering and manufacturing etc.

They know the design process like the back of their hand. Strategic Designers are experts of the

design process. They know it so well that they can “swim” in it, mould it and control it. The ability to have

ultimate control over the design process means that they can ensure that the strategic objectives are

achieved or at least maintained. Strategic Designers also know that in order to manage the chaos,

design can sometimes be a strong process is the key.

They are able to do everything. Being designers frst, they are able to do everything a designer can,

and perhaps more, because of their connection to the wider view and their ability to reframe. The

problem is that because of their focus in design strategy and management they do tend to get rusty, in

fact very rusty with the technical design stuff. Therefore it is very advisable for Strategic Designers to keep

that “designer in you” alive. Personal projects, constant sketching, running design programs are all ways

strategic designers use to keep in touch with things.

Characteristics of Strategic Designersby Tom Klinkowstein

They also know that they don’t have to do everything. Strategic Designers know the value of a good team and great teamwork. They also know when to let go and try not to do everything. Letting go is the hardest, but they know where their value lies and when they can add this value in the design process.

There is “no job too big or too small”. The interesting thing about Strategic Designers is that their

ability is scalable. No problem too big or too small. Strategic Design can be about the smallest thing

and also about the biggest. You don’t have to be running multi-million dollar programs to be strategic;

you can also be strategic with small meaningful solutions. Strategic design is about an approach or a

process of design. Like any process once you get it right it can applicable on many levels and in many

situations.

References:About Face 3 The Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin, Wiley Publishing | IN, 2007

Tom Klinkowstein, Notes on “What Design Has Become” & “Characteristics of a Strategic Designer”

The Language of Advertising http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist34/Unit_03/connotation.htm