Design by anger
Fri, Sep 28, 07
I am one of those designers who gets physically ill when confronted with a particularly egregious design mistake or a complex problem that assaults my design sensibilities. My heart rate quickens. I get sweaty. Sometimes I get a red flush on my face and neck. Usually, followed by a headache, mild nausea and general malaise until I manage to solve the problem. I’ve lived with this for a long time and even publicly discussed it on the Internets on several occasions.
There are some advantages, though. Especially for my clients. I am highly motivated to solve their design problems, even if it’s just to make myself feel better.
Until the solution is at hand, I’m angry. Angry at the problem. Angry at the people who created it in the first place. Angry at others who didn’t try harder. Angry at technological barriers. Angry at our lack of understanding of cognitive processes. Angry at the tax it places on my enjoyment of life and the burden it dumps on users. Anger is often my motivator to slice through design problems.
The payoff is the heightened feeling one gets when the problem is solved…all the more sweeter as it comes after an anger-coated adrenaline rush.
Apparently, I’m not alone:
This is why most dorks and nerds fail to launch start-ups that last. The technology is good and the applications can be fun but they approach a problem the wrong way: to a nerd, a problem is fun. It just doesn’t make them angry enough.
Product managers worrying about adoption curves for their new application should stop concentrating on features and look to the emotions and the experiences of their customers. Consumers change behaviour through anger. Skype, for instance, tapped into a general feeling in the market of “I’m angry at my telco”.
Jeff Bonforte, a senior director at Yahoo!, talks about anger driving innovation in a podcast at ITConversations.
I’d love to know if anybody else feels the same way.
Design by phone book, IBM style
Fri, Sep 28, 07
If you ever wondered why many of the IBM product designs in the last two decades looked like they came out of a design shop whose principal customers were Bulgarian shoe stores during the Cold War, Fast Company has an answer in an interview with Sam Lucente, formerly of IBM and currently HP’s first-ever vice president of design:
Fast Company: IBM basically defined the pinnacle of corporate design—what was it like when you were there during the 1980s and early ’90s?
Sam Lucente: IBM had a very regimented, Bauhaus approach to design. There were strict rules about the color of the boxes, the way you ventilated a product, the actual design of the louver. Just massive levels of detail, which came out of a book of standards that everyone had to adhere to. It made sense, because there were so many different products coming out of IBM; we needed a uniform look-and-feel. Besides, a design team could bring down an entire development effort if, say, it went off on its own and crafted a delicate hinge that’s beautiful but not reliable. Imagine the warranty costs that the company would incur. So I really saw the power of a unified group of design standards. But I also saw how limiting they could be, from a creative point of view.
It’s a good thing then that IBM got out of its most visible consumer-facing business line by selling its PC unit to Lenovo. It was one of the most spectacular failures of drigiste systems design:
IBM, the first big organization to pioneer its own consistent style, had maintained during Lucente’s tenure a binder of design standards nearly as thick as the Manhattan phone book.
I guess we can now add design by phone book to our lexicon, alongside design by committee.
