This month’s issue of Fast Company has a really nice profile of designer David Kelley, founder of the design firm Ideo and the Stanford d.School, who has been battling cancer. He’s gone from being an expert designer to being an expert on design thinking by helping companies improve their processes for developing or refining products. One story in particular jumped out at me:
It took Kelley a while to appreciate the power of stepping back before forging ahead. In the mid-1980s, he says, he used to write proposals with the various phases of the process — understanding, observation, brainstorming, prototyping — priced separately. Clients invariably would say, “Don’t do that early fooling around. Start with phase three.” Kelley realized that the early phases were where the big ideas came from — and what separated his firm from a bunch of management consultants. “That moment was really big for me,” he says. “After that, I’d say, ‘No way, I won’t take the job if you scrap those phases. That’s where the value is.’ “
Beautifully said. As designers, we’re so motivated by the desire to do, we can easily fall into the trap of imposing our own will on the design problem.
There’s a fantastic discussion on the most recent Educause Now Podcast between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell about the merits of Edupunk. They both more or less agree that the spirit of DIY is a great mode of working, but where they disagree is on the appropriateness of the term “punk” in education. Campbell argues against it because, from the viewpoint of a casual oberserver, the term “punk” connotates a snotty, “stick it to the man,” down with authority vibe. He brings up the Sex Pistols, and the infamous “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” line that Johnny Rotten told the audience after their last show (a show consisting of exactly one song).
I respect Johnny Rotten (if not for his contribution to music, then certainly for the fact that he’s an Arsenal supporter), but I find it a bit cringe-inducing that when the word punk is mentioned, the Sex Pistols are frequently the first thing that comes to mind. Let’s review their entire contribution to the genre: one freaking record. That’s it.
Punk was a phenomenon that came out of a variety of places all over the globe, and was led by people coming from any number of socioeconomic and philosophical backgrounds. Take a listen to Never Mind the Bollocks… (made by nihilistic Londoners) and compare it to, say Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen (middle class white guys from suburban Los Angeles), or I Against I by Bad Brains (Rastafarian jazz musicians from DC). All three are completely different, but it’s undeniable that they’re all punk records. If there’s a vein of anti-leadership that goes through the punk philosophy, it’s less out of desire to be snotty and attention-seeking (as the Sex Pistols were), and more of a call to action on the part of individuals.
Also contrary to Campbell’s perspective is the history of punk musicians in higher education. Greg Graffin of Bad Religion has a doctorate from Cornell, Milo Aukerman took a leave of absence from the Descendents to earn his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, and Henry Rollins will visit any university that will listen to him rant about politics.
As of late, the local news media has been running a number of “holy crap, it’s a recession! Why is [insert public agency] spending your tax dollars on [insert derogatory adjective] art while they’re facing a [insert random number] million dollar shortfall?!!” Apparently, they assume their viewers cannot grasp the concept of budget allocation that takes place months or years in advance.
10 Connects (the bizarre new name for our local CBS affiliate) ran a story last night (my apologies if their embedded video takes long to load – their player doesn’t seem as efficient as YouTube’s) about the new $27,000 topiary bull sitting in front of the new Marshall Center. The pictures don’t really do it justice – I drove by it last week, and I honestly think it looks pretty dope. It’s a nice touch for our campus, which frankly looks like a giant office park (with the exception of MLK plaza). Based on comments to the 10 Connects story, and on a similar story run by the Oracle, it would seem I am in the minority.
As an aside, I actually have nothing personal against 10 Connects – I interviewed for a job there once, and tend prefer their newscasts over their competitors.
The local ABC affiliate ran a similar story last week about the upcoming Lights On Tampa light show, which projects the work of animators and video artists onto various buildings around downtown. The project cost an incredible amount of money, though the majority comes from private donors. The rest comes from the state (money that can’t be spent on anything else), and about $70,000 comes from the city. Seems a small price to pay to spruce up a city that is about to host a very small game of American football called the Super Bowl (perhaps you’ve heard of it?).
I was walking around downtown last Friday and managed to see a surreal sequence of people hanging out on the sidewalk (surreal at least, for Tampa) in front of the new Skypoint condo building. First I walked past skinny hipsters sprawled out on outdoor couches in front of a trendy-looking wine bar. About 15 feet later, I walked past an overweight homeless woman doing a word search on a bench crammed with grocery bags (filled with what I assumed were all her worldly possessions).
A couple questions sprang to mind: First, where the hell did this wine bar and all these hipsters come from? Second, how do both these sets of people coexist footsteps apart, seemingly oblivious to each other?
For about 4 months, I worked in downtown Tampa and frequently spent time after work aimlessly walking the city, occasionally dropping by the library or going to the Forum to buy hockey tickets. The one thing that seemed pervasive, even after big events or after 5pm when most of the workers would leave, was the homeless. I think this may explain just why Tampa’s homeless is probably the most chilled out homeless population I’ve ever encountered – they pretty much own the place.
In places like New York or Chicago, I have been harassed – even after handing over the change in my pocket. In Orlando (the only other downtown I have spent significant time in), I was once bothered by a guy who kept calling me “Mr. Wally” and wouldn’t leave until I gave him five bucks.
I’m glad that there are hipsters moving in, spending their money, and injecting some semblance of life into the place at night. But at the same time, I’m a little concerned that maybe they’ll end up displacing those who are already there after 5pm.
Yes, the blog is called “design:learning” so I’ll bring it back around to the topic: in last summer’s Interactive Media course I had to do usability studies on an instructional website, and the one that I found was gcflearnfree.org, a killer site run by Goodwill that has free instructional modules for learning basic computer and life skills. It’s a great example of the positive things that we can do in this industry.
My wife and I had a debate yesterday about tweens and their use of technology. The crux of her argument was that kids constantly being on Facebook, MySpace, etc. did something to take away their humanity. My perspective was that such technologies have just the opposite effect, in that they invite their users to create and interact with others, instead of just passively consuming. I think it’s a normal response to be wary of new things taken up by the next generation, especially if it seems radically new. If you consider just what these technologies do, however, I don’t think they’re so different from what already exists. YouTube isn’t much different from television, Facebook is the new party line, and Blogs are the new books.
In fact, even though we don’t consider them to be “technology” simply because they’re not new, books are really just an example of some of the most successful technology ever developed by humans. There’s an interesting post yesterday by Michael Wesch about how print media changed society (the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution) and the potential that participatory media could have. He also notes a potentially creepy idea brought up by Howard Rheingold – that such media records “a great deal of public behavior… in a way that makes it suitable for systematic study,” creating a digital panopticon.
Jeremy Bentham proposed such a design for prisons, so prisoners could easily be observed without their knowledge. All of which sounds an awful lot like Facebook, which takes the information from your profile (unbeknownst to you) to deliver targeted advertising messages. In China, there are supposedly “five-cent commentators” – people who are paid to post comments supporting government viewpoints.
This is not to discount the potential for change that participatory media has, but just something to keep in mind. Books, certainly had their own problems at the beginning (“So if I want a copy of this book I have to copy it by hand?”).
On a completely unrelated Jeremy Bentham note (how many times a day does one get to write that?), Lost is starting in a little over 2 weeks, and I am super stoked.
I saw the trailer on TV last night for He’s Just Not That Into You the movie. 
