Interface Design

 

  

We are easily frustrated when dealing with interfaces. Things get even tougher if we need to interface with a machine while others watch out of the corner of their eye—or while waiting behind us. Sometimes it is a good way to strike up a desperate conversation, perhaps proving people are generally kind.

Fundamentally, interface design requires discerning acceptable simplification. However, there is a limit on how much you can simplify a design—and you can never win— oversimplification irritates power users.

Designing interactions should pursue two categories of concerns: 1) simplify and 2) assist user.

Here are examples of human-machine interface challenges from the non-digital world.

Washington DC Metro: Scary and confusing. Need tourist mode.

Cricut Cutting Machine: Manageable and sufficient

Time Tested Designs

Here are some thoughts about one bad design and a few good ones. 

This is what happens when you don't understand users and subordinate function to form. The G4 Cube was a commercial failure even if MoMA likes it. It was a commercial failure for good reason – it didn't work well. The computer would overheat and the gestural controls didn’t work correctly. The high price diverted consumers’ money from other purchases.

Inefficient designs contain a lot of embodied energy and consume resources that could have been used elsewhere. Embodied energy is the energy (and pollution) associated with a product, including stuff you don’t think about such as mining, transportation, administration, disposal etc. Bad products that are expensive and soon discarded always have a high embodied energy.

Here is the how it was released (20 years ago this month!):

MACWORLD EXPO, NEW YORK—July 19, 2000—Apple® today introduced the Power Mac™ G4 Cube, an entirely new class of computer that delivers the performance of a Power Mac G4 in an eight inch cube suspended in a stunning crystal-clear enclosure.

“The G4 Cube is simply the coolest computer ever,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “An entirely new class of computer, it marries the Pentium-crushing performance of the Power Mac G4 with the miniaturization, silent operation and elegant desktop design of the iMac. It is an amazing engineering and design feat, and we’re thrilled to finally unveil it to our customers.”

Old designs that show how it’s done 

It is a shame to be negative all the time. Hopefully love and creation wins over hate and destruction. Therefore, to offset my negative statements about the time-failed Apple G4 Cube, I wanted to offer a few old designs that are the opposite. They work great and have held up over time. They are the Cavendish banana, the offset snow shovel, and the Citroen DS.

A banana is a design? Yes, welcome to the 2020s – designers design more than toasters. We don’t have to be stupid about things that don’t involve a pretty product wrap. We understand taste, tactile response, interactions, packaging and all the things that go into a good banana. Joseph Paxon understood these things too when he designed his banana, which also happened to be resistant to the mold that wiped out all the Big Mike (Gros Michel) bananas. It was a compromise – Paxon’s Cavendish banana didn’t travel as well as the Gros Michel because of its thinner skin and it tasted different. Paxon got it right though, the Cavendish has dominated the banana export market for over 60 years and lets me make smoothies every morning.

It seems presumptuous to assert the importance of industrial design in genetics, but design is design. If you get the right people and the right tools and you can do anything. 

The offset snow shovel is more expensive and harder to store than a standard snow shovel, but it works well. A simple design change that answered the question, what is the most ergonomic design for the user? Let’s do that, the designers thought. They ended up with this ugly, awkward shovel that some people hate and some people love, but it has lasted the test of time and it works well.

I loved the Citroen DS when I first saw it. It has an exquisite blend of aesthetics and function that shows how traditional industrial design can work. 

Beauty

The effect of beauty is easier to consider than its essence. We respond to beauty and we desire to protect it. As a Christian, I move the notion of beauty can be moved into the theological domain. Inner beauty are those things that look like Christ, external beauty are those things that look like the Garden of Eden.

In design, I prefer to think of allure rather than beauty. Moreover, art should be gently cleaved from design. Art should not be dragged down by the mechanistic concerns of design. Styling is not art, and it is not industrial design. Styling is a part of industrial design and an important historical foundation. Styling can probably be considered the foundation of design, but in the 21^st century design is much more than styling.

I hope a three-to-one good to bad design ratio is an uplifting view -- I don’t wish to be cranky and negative.

Surprise in design

Design works outside science. Science is a useful tool, just like language is a useful tool. But science is based on assumptions of rationality and empirically driven truths that can be drawn from the apparent chaos in which we live. Design embraces chaos and extracts features from it that appeal to humans.

We can use qualitative methods, such as ethnography, and artistic insights to create product appeal to groups different than ourselves. Research requires an articulated framework describing an understanding of how the world works and how you can learn about how it works. It should (but rarely does outside of dissertations) require a positionality statement also because your position with respect to data influences acquisition methods and interpretation, among other things. 

As a Christian, I don’t follow “methodological naturalism” as a guide, I believe in God’s personal involvement. However methodological naturalism can’t handle the notion of irrationality. It has a faith component, namely that the human mind is rational and the world has "closed regularities", meaning that there are no exceptions to scientific laws.

The words art, design, and craft have specific meanings. Design can mean a purposeful development of a functional product. Industrial design also considers the artistic influences that create appeal beyond the functional. Industrial design embraces ethnographic methods that aid in designing things appropriate for people who are different than the designer.

Designing things in the tradition of industrial design, taps into both functional (mechanistic) and “non-functional” (non-mechanistic) elements. But the non-functional elements in particular, can be rooted in faith and worldview issues. The non-functional elements are where art flows into design, and this can involve surprise.

I love surprise in design, it has delightfully irrational elements that derive from outside of the weight of science. Pleasant surprise is a beautiful element in design.

Air Force One Livery Design

The history of the United States' “Air Force One” is interesting. It involved a famous industrial designer and very personal choices by the John and Jackie Kennedy. Raymond Loewy made two visits with John Kennedy and they worked out the ideas with "crayons and cutting up paper." Here is an account taken from the New England Historical Society:

Then Loewy visited the National Archives to examine historic documents. He was struck by the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence, it had the new country's name set widely spaced in capital letters in a typeface known as Caslon.

Kennedy had already ordered the Air Force to remove the military lettering in favor of the simple United States of America.  And he told Loewy he liked blue.

Loewy chose two blues: slate and cyan. He left the underside of the fuselage silver and added the presidential seal near the nose, a large American flag to the tail, and the words "United States of America" in capital letters using the Caslon typeface.

The First Lady had a hand in designing the interior of the plane. She made sure the president had his own entrance, a customized bed, a stateroom, a conference room, glassware from Tiffany’s and a pale blue rug with an American eagle in the center of an oval with 13 stars.

Loewy's 1962 drawing
(Source: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/196025)

Text source: http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/jfk-helps-design-air-force-one/

Design is stressful!

This is an excerpt from the epilogue of my newest book:"Intense Design: Product Design Lessons From Cold War Era Skunk Works"

Design is stressful. You don’t have a clear path to success. Your stomach churns because your design seems to rely more on gut instinct and desperate assumptions than on things you can explain mathematically. Most painfully, you think you haven’t found “the great idea.” You wonder what you haven’t done correctly and what you have missed.

On top of this angst is our ego. It follows us and taunts us. We want to say “This is my design,” when in reality, 99 percent is existing stuff that you rearranged. You want to develop a great design, but you realize your work is in response to someone else’s insight into the need for your design in the first place. Your idea did not fall into a valley of awaiting desire, but was sculpted from rock laid before you by others.

I have lost sleep and dealt with a lot of angst in the process of design. Personally, I battle with:

1) worrying about missing the best design solution and 

2) subordinating my ego to the design.

I want to believe there is some ideal design, and I want to keep the creative process going until I arrive at this ideal. The ideal design doesn’t seem to be the case as I look at the man-made world around me. All designs are ephemeral, replaced in good time by designs more suitable for the day. I have had technically sophisticated designs get completely replaced by a new technology. I’ve had embarrassingly simple designs that have lasted for decades. Basic forms and functions already exist in nature, from geometric forms in crystals to round trees rolling down hills. Designers more often than not are manipulating what already exists. However, we tend toward perfectionism and strive to create the perfect design. Because our identity is in design, we wish to separate ourselves from the “amateurs” and dazzle the world with our ability. We can get some peace in knowing that our design is not the ending point, but one of many points in a galaxy of evolving ideas. Is there a perfect poem or painting? If so, has it been read or observed, or does it live in an artist’s mind, never to be degraded by actual execution on paper or canvas?

This leads into the problem with ego. Pride is a fundamental fight. We want our mark on the world because we believe we have something distinctive to contribute (and we do!). We don’t want to be someone who shovels coal all day with nothing to show for our labors but a pile of coal. We want to create. We were meant to be creators. We identify ourselves as such, and strive to execute this desire in our profession. Therefore, we want all our professional work to start with “let me show you my design.” However, we work in a collaborative community with an intellectual ecology, whether across time or contemporaneously. We wonder if we are a singular sensation like the Slinkey and Salinger, or copious creators like King and Kandinsky.

See the book at: 

https://www.amazon.com/Intense-Design-Product-design-lessons/dp/1986573974/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Engineering for Industrial Designers and Inventors made it to the Best Product Design Books of All Time

I'm happy to announce that my book, "Engineering for Industrial Designers and Inventors: Fundamentals for Designers of Wonderful Things", made it to BookAuthority's Best Product Design Books of All Time:
https://bookauthority.org/books/best-product-design-books?t=cnz1vz&s=award&book=1491932619

STEAM Education Hurts Art

Leave art alone. Why has art gotten drawn into STEM education, producing the cute acronym STEAM? Is art the decorative box that you put technology into? Have artists devolved to stylists?

The problem with STEAM is that art is pulled in as an afterthought, it is anchored to something not of its own making.

Art is often connected to technology, whether paint pigments or casting processes. However, art should not be constrained by these technical matters. Art merely uses the tools of technology. Technology shouldn’t use art.

Every year, my students and I make and launch rockets. The science is pretty simple: make everything aerodynamic and keep the center of pressure behind the center of gravity. There is no math. It is a lot of fun and it is always magical to touch the sky with rockets. However, it is not really STEM education. It is building stuff and having fun.

Launching a rocket or flying a drone is not STEM education, it is using technology. The acronym STEM is problematic in that it gives equal value to all subjects and suggests a sequential movement that is wrong. One must first understand math and science before moving to engineering and finally technology. Using technology has nothing to do with understanding the science and math that undergird it. It is unwise to equally couple the easier insights of using technology with the more difficult challenges of understanding science and math.

Technology is more important than science and math for most of us. We want X-ray technicians to be expert practitioners on safely operating X-ray machines. We don’t care if they know calculus or physics. But our educational system is locked into developing structured, theoretical foundations for professions.

Interdisciplinary study is good but we should study MSET and A instead of STEAM. Maybe MSET&A education is too hard to pronounce, let’s call it design education and move on.

And one more thing…

While it is easier to define what art is not, the Oxford English Dictionary commonly uses terms such as creative expression, beauty and emotional power. However, non artistic expressions can be creative, non artistic expressions can be beautiful.

One of the OED’s actual definitions is:

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/art

 

Rocket party: STEM-like activity but actually model building and fun.
Painting party: Art with nothing to do with STEM.

Birds nest: I took this photo in my yard today. Is the bird an artist?

Cult of Efficiency

Efficiency

We lust after it. We now have a handful of people defining the experience of many on social media platforms. Reddit has less than 500 paid employees (but thousands of volunteers.) Other platforms also have small, giggling gaggles of employees defining the user experience.

Coders create the environment where technology devotees live. For the sake of efficiency, we cede our information curation to a handful of coders. Voice AI offers only one verbal response. Efficient but scary.

Efficiency and autonomy seem to battle. When ostensibly wise coders and AI prompt recommended language and succinct answers, we forfeit something – but it isn’t our time. We seem to gain time with this added “efficiency”. But we must recognize that language is also a technology too and does not provide some absolute freedom of expression.

We are also overwhelmed with information. Although we ask AI and the coders behind it to ease our environment, the cascading flow of bad news in front of our eyes makes us assuage our guilt by claiming some type of victim status.

Therefore we sometimes need to take a walk in the woods and draw something with a pencil. We need to use our extra time wisely. Maybe efficiency needs to be redefined. I basically never proof read emails or messages, I trust Google with my information curation, I sometimes used recommended responses on texts. I have been sucked into the lust of efficiency. I love it. I can get so much done so quickly.

Rambling words don’t counter my tendency towards using the highest efficiency systems possible. I look at every physical and virtual system and think about optimizing its efficiency. I can’t help myself. But I observe the danger of efficiency and try to design wonderful things with my free time. Sometimes I just watch YouTube “how it’s made” videos and eat chocolate too. C’est la vie. 

History of the Internet in Four Words

                                        Geeks

                                        Wow

                                        Stop

                                        Surrender

Professional Obligations

This is an extract about ethics from my latest book, "Intense Design".  I have had five serious ethical challenges in my career and they can be very painful.

You claim expertise in a discipline in order to richly contribute to your field. However, legal implications arise when you assert expertise. Specifically, you can be considered liable if you are negligent in your work. The legal terms will be discussed in more detail later; however, it is helpful to recognize your legal standing as a professional who ‘professes’ expertise in something. This summary of the standard to which you might be held comes from the 1954 State of California’s case law in Gagne v. Bertran, (43 Cal.2d 481). Under the “The Cause of Action for Negligence,” it states:

The services of experts are sought because of their special skill. They have a duty to exercise the ordinary skill and competence of members of their profession, and a failure to discharge that duty will subject them to liability for negligence. Those who hire such persons are not justified in expecting infallibility, but can expect only reasonable care and competence. They purchase service, not insurance (SCOCAL).

Ethical Design and Legal Considerations

Designers understand their products better than anyone. They know what they will and won’t do. However, what do you do when your design is not allowed to be safe? Who defines, “what is safe?” The qualifications of the user often dictate standards of safety. Children are assumed to be untrained and unpredictable (“presumptively capable of negligence,” in legalese). If users are engineers, they should be considered highly trained and technically sophisticated. Those claiming a profession are professing expertise in certain areas and are held to a higher standard of expectations in the safe usage of a product or system.

As a design professional, you can be considered professionally negligent if you are not reasonably competent to do your work, or if you do your work poorly. There is a standard of care expected by the public and you are responsible for preserving and maintaining that confidence. The standard of care delivered by a design professional changes over time. For example, advances in research, instrumentation, and computer modeling raise the expected standard of care. 

Surprises and Trends

A light-hearted summation of things that surprise me and a guess at a couple long-term trends. Food for thought!

Surprise

• How we gave away private data to anybody who asked or promised us a little treat.
• Continuing to use astronauts (and fighter pilots).
• Bulky smart phones have not yet been replaced by smart apparel.

Long term trends

• Nomadic workforce. Groups of digital nomads who take their tiny houses and move with the weather, perhaps as entire communities.
• Biological revolution will follow the IT revolution. Customized organic substances will heal, protect, communicate, and build for us. Genome editing is just the start.

Ethics in Design

Often discussions of ethics get very academic and consider high visibility failures such as the space shuttle Challenger’s O-rings or Volkswagen’s emission scandal (“Dieselgate”). However, most designers work for companies that are not going to have that kind of oversight. Nobody cares about the shortcuts little Company XYZ takes. No regulatory body is going to bother them, no lawyers will knock on the door, and the media will not pursue them. However, when an ethical issue does arise and an employee does what he or she thinks is ethical, some companies will retaliate. The employee is hung on a pole with the carcass left to warn others, embodied in stories and corporate culture. When others think about ethics versus job security in this type of culture, their feet might quiver and they will not feel like they have sufficient job security to follow their convictions.

Small businesses can have the same challenges if the owner has no ethical scruples. A company’s ethics can be determined by one person. Even though the sense of widely held ethical standards is often supported by statute or regulation, these are far from comprehensive, and the agencies that enforce them are not omniscient. Moreover, regulatory agencies are not nearly as effective in rooting out unethical behavior as a culture where the boss explicitly states that unethical behavior is unacceptable and acts in accordance. This executive commitment is supported when coworkers report infractions and employees feel their jobs are secure when they decide to act ethically. It is further supported when individuals who take unethical actions are individually punished. This type of culture makes ethical standards more than a memo from the CEO or a poster on the wall.

However, CEOs contend with intense financial pressures. Designers don’t work for free, and someone has to make sure money is earned. Sales and marketing personnel have similar challenges. Even though designers often lock horns with them, try operating a profitable company without sales and marketing employees—you will feel the brute wall of market forces slam against your stylish studio.

Ethical standards need to adapt to changing technology. Artificial intelligence, the internet, and nuclear energy are examples of technology that require a rethinking of ethical standards. However, these are difficult issues. Who gets to decide when artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, and nuclear energy are used for good or bad? Librarians (and others) have been trying to protect intellectual property for decades, but technology such as photocopiers, digital cameras, and the internet have made this goal very difficult.

Designs can have far reaching social impact. Many lives have been ruined or opportunities crushed by benign things such as pain medicines and video games. The internet presents us with images that we don’t ask for, artificial intelligence curates our entertainment and information searches, and there are many enticing technologies that are ostensibly more attractive than a walk in the woods. There is a long history of technology intended for good but used for evil, from nails and chains to electricity and the internet.

This is an excerpt from my new book:

"Intense Design: Product Design Lessons From Cold War Era Skunk Works" 

Check out my YouTube Channel too!

Honesty in Academia and Art

  

A well dressed, well-spoken admissions officer told us with a straight face that they read all the student essays at an Ivy League university we were checking out. 35,000 admission essays.

This was ridiculous and deceptive proclamation. The sad part is many applicants spend weeks getting their essay to look perfect. Clearly the facts are different, but we lie to our young people to present some sort of ideal impression. Us older, alas, more cynical people know when the numbers don’t line up.

How many people do you need to read, assess, and quantify 35,000 essays every year? They had an 8% acceptance rate. Why would they bother to read essays from students that didn’t meet other criteria? What are those secret criteria that they mask with their “essay” criterion?

I don’t know what they do with these essays. Logically, they use them for borderline cases and other program goals. Maybe they use keyword searches, discourse analysis, or AI driven evaluations. Maybe they don’t read most of them. The sad part of this deception is the false promise it makes and the wastage of applicants’ time.

And then we have the world of art in which branded artists seem to be more important than the art itself. We have art trying to squeeze into STEM education and thereby belittling art and selling it as design and styling. All with the catching acronym STEAM.

Recently a museum displaying the works of French Fauvist-style painter Etienne Terrus discovered that more than half of their collection was counterfeit. Counterfeits are humbling. The fact that counterfeiters spend time doing this work has a flattering component. However, it highlights the contrived values that can put fine art into the same category of DeBeers controlled diamonds. Perhaps this is why people love Bansky.

We all struggle with honesty. Read John Murray’s “Sanctity of Truth” if you really want to be humbled. I had my own business for a while and if you don’t present your best face to the market you won’t last long. Listing your string of failures isn’t normally a good marketing plan. 

It is humbling that both academia and art, which one would think are purveyors of a type of truth, struggle with what honesty means.

Food and Friends

I have many regrets. 

A few years ago I was walking(!) to the Ethnography Museum in Abu Dhabi. It was well over 100 F. I stopped at a marina (I love boats) and spoke with one of the employees. He invited me in for tea. I was so focused on getting to the museum, I declined his invitation. How foolish. Being goal oriented is good, but sometimes unwise.

Being invited to eat with someone turns a conversation into a relationship. It seems to be the most basic element of friendship and hospitality. My wife is very good at this, I am not. My idea of a conversation is chatting while standing in a hallway near another person with head, neck, and feet at awkward angles. I don’t sit and eat, sharing intimacy of an ancient sort.

Food is part of my Christian religion, from the apple at the Garden of Eden, to the Last Supper, to the heavenly feast. There is a lot of food involved.

I really need to buy more donuts and kale salad for people.

Speed Bumps in Design: How not to get slowed down

Anything that slows down your design process is a speed bump. Speed bumps don’t belong in conceptual design.

Let’s consider some of the speed bumps that can arise at the conceptual stage:

1)   slow decisions

2)   overthinking

3)   changing design goals.

Slow Decisions

Deciding on a best approach is stressful. You want lots of data and proof. You want to see what your competitors are doing. You don’t want to take risks. You want your bosses’ approval.

The speed bumps presented by slow decision making can be ameliorated by

1) recognizing there is no perfect design

2) authorizing a single decision maker who can decide quickly

3) accepting mistakes as part of the process. The speed of a design is slowed down in an environment where mistakes are not allowed, or when you can’t get a decision that lets you move forward.

The process of design usually causes interpersonal friction. You contend with the “my way or the highway” mentality as well as the harmonizer who takes a democratic approach to design. The harmonizer tries to make everyone happy. The autocratic route is efficient, but could miss the design goal, and the harmonizing path makes everyone unhappy. Sometimes the customer doesn’t even know what he or she wants.

Overthinking

‘Paralysis by analysis’ is a well-known aphorism. You are trying to do excellent work and create an excellent product. You want everything to be perfect. Unfortunately, design requires some intuition and guessing. This makes your stomach churn and anxiety swell. You want to solve a math equation and all we get is a mass of partial information. While you can structure qualitative information into themes and process it statistically, you rarely get pointers saying “this is the right design.” Designers make something from nothing. That is our burden. Nothingness is scary.

A good way to handle the overthinking part of design is to rely on time tested approaches that are commonly shared in design guides produced by manufacturers and professional associations. During my career, I have created several of these for a variety of products and systems. They are usually well thought out and completely grounded in real world experience. This may appear to close doors but it lets you move forward quickly. After a product is fully created, you can go back and optimize things.

Changing Design Goals

Changing design goals and “mission creep” are common, even though every bit of management advice you will read warns against this. However, in the world of product design, goals are established with incomplete information. While a product’s mechanistic goals might be clearly articulated at the start of a project, it often isn’t clear at the onset whether the goals are achievable. This goal glare is especially true for advanced designs that explore new territories of science, technology, and human interactions. The time, talent, technology, and resource requirements are speculative. Moreover, the connection with non-mechanistic elements can be difficult to initially identify. In addition, through market research and product experimentation, you may see that your original goal is not practical. Safety concerns and product regulations can redirect what can be accomplished with a new design.

Therefore, project schedules and Gantt charts need tweaking, and goals are often more fluid than we like. These design goal changes can be minor or so large they derail a project. Nevertheless, they can easily be the biggest speed bump in the design process.

This is an excerpt from my new book, "Intense Design:Product Design Lessons From Cold War Era Skunk Works"

Check out my YouTube Channel too!