According to Sitemeter, I get a lot of Google image searches that lead to photos of my FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER. Lots of click-throughs to a little girl. Which, I only have to assume from the high level of traffic, makes most of you people who look at her enjoying ice cream or lolling about in a fountain (and you know who you are) PEDOPHILES.
For those of you from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Stockholm and Missouri:
"NUDLE GIRLS" = INTERPOL.
For those of you from Exeter who can't spell, "HOTT" will identify your computer in your dorm room, leading the FBI to your door 2.5 hours from now.
Look out. I'm coming for you.
For those of you in Quebec that find my photos of the chameleon at the Shedd Aquarium "HOTT," that's cool.
So do I.
William H. (Holly) Whyte was an activist who wrote a lot of books and articles, but is best known to me for his book and film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
I use these to show students the usefulness of direct observation over letting self and organization be ruled by existing assumptions. Today I will also drive home the necessity of being able to market your findings, as Whyte did so well throughout his life. I don’t know when the man slept.
It makes me tired to think about it, but then I think about how I spend a lot of my time on this class, more time than I really have to spend, and I realize you just have to really like what you’re doing and it doesn’t make you tired.
Whyte and his posse used direct observation with still and video cameras to examine New York’s plazas and parks to determine what worked for people, and then Whyte used the stories from this data to push public policy to support healthy public spaces. The policy changes he pushed through were sometimes at the expense of free market players like developers, architects and designers.
There is an ongoing discussion theme in my class: Policy-making vs. free markets. Which is more important, more useful, more worthy?
For my students, this is a factor in what they are going to do after two and a half more years of grad school.
This morning I heard two pieces on NPR, back-to-back, that brought this conversation to mind again.
The first NPR piece was about people and organizations paying money for the carbon dioxide they emit.
“Carbon offset” was a new term for me. The funds raised from people buying their rights to drive SUVs are used for projects to reduce carbon emissions. This effectively distributes responsibility and gives regular people a mea culpa for being typical Americans.
The ostensible and stated goal of these carbon offset sellers is to affect the behavior of the masses, and bring about awareness of CO2 emissions and the greenhouse effect – and, ultimately, affect policy. Credible? I’m not so sure.
A British environmentalist on NPR likened carbon offsets to the sale of indulgences prior to the reformation, that you can buy your way to a clean soul. Okay, but it’s still an example of grassroots push to change minds and policy and an example of free-market capitalism being used to - maybe - change the world.
In the second NPR piece I heard this morning you have Moscow, a place that needs its masses to step up and push for reforms with the whole car problem.
Since free market capitalism is supposedly taking hold, tons of people are buying and driving cars, creating huge problems with traffic jams, corrupt traffic cops and pollution. Holly Whyte would have a lot to say about this, I’m sure, and he would probably get out his cameras, notebooks and charts, graphs and diagrams and sell his inputs to change zoning laws and policy. So is the use of this kind of research and analysis applied to policy antithetical to free markets?
Maybe later, if it's interesting, I’ll let you know what my students have to say.
Drawing is the final test of an idea, that there is an idea. You can bullshit your way through a weak idea with words, but when you have to draw it you have to have something to draw.
Check your ego. You’ve got to start somewhere. Turn zero into crap, then turn crap into good.
Quality is less important than self-assurance. Find something that works for you. Look at Are those drawings good?
They're confident. And she's rich. Look at She's a goddess, but are those drawings good?
They are magnificent. Because they are confident. The worst thing a drawing can look is tentative.
Use clip art and trace over it. There’s lots of clip art online. You can probably also find some as part of your software programs.
It was done with clip art in PowerPoint.
Set up a scene, take a photo, and trace a line drawing over it.
Draw stick figure scenarios, frame by frame -- figure out how to illustrate what's happening between the figures.
This interaction illustrates your idea. You can create really concise scenarios of the user benefit (user benefit, user benefit, USER BENEFIT!) of a given offering, whether it's a product, a service or a feature of a product or service.
The better you get at making basic stick figures and shapes, the better you'll be at sketching.
Take the funny pages and draw what you see to find where your copying skills are best. How do you visualize the human body?
Some people make the human body out of sausages, some make them out of cubes and some just do an overall outline.
If it's a drawing of an interface, show the detail and once you work out the details, do it neatly.
(Almost all these ideas about drawing were Toby's and Jeff's. One was Jeremy's.)
Tomorrow in class we're talking about storytelling and prototyping, and no one has done these quite as eloquently, throughout their whole careers, as The Eameses were designers, and husband and wife, best known for their furniture.
But they designed anything and everything, houses, curricula, exhibits, communications, film -- and are revered inside and outside the world of designers for the things they made and for their professional practice, the Eames Office.
For a couple hours I've been jotting lessons we can learn from the Eameses in preparation for discussion tomorrow.
Some companies have a culture of prototyping; the Eameses took the culture of prototyping to an extreme.
They lived their lives that way, professionally and personally, and then they told the stories in films and photos. For example, they built their own home, a prototype of a do-it-yourself, modern house designed to bring the good life to the general public by integrating high and low art and modern materials and construction technologies. Then they made a film titled House: After Five Years of Living.
There were no boundaries between life and work for them, which is probably why the Eames Office only took on projects that they were intensely interested in. That Charles was interested in.
For a project to be successful, there needs to be vision.
At Pixar, this is the job of the head writer(s) and director, like John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird.
So what I mean is, there has to be an aspirational vision that you believe in to keep you going. Something about believing that design can really do good, or can push the world toward progress, or create a new profession, or make lots of money, or raise the consciousness of the audience.
Talk up to your users. Believe in them.
Design is some of the hardest work there is, because when you're making something there are no shortcuts.
Constraints come as close as anything to shortcuts, though.
Constraints are a designer's friend.
It's a great idea to be that picky about projects -- only do what intensely interests you -- but you have to be really, really good to earn this right.
Prototype like mad and maybe you'll make something really, really good.
Hire great, really talented people and manage them heavily with vague direction so you seem like a god.
Solve the problem: bring something special of your own to the table to make it not just good, not better, but great and unexpected.
(From Eames Design, by John and Marilyn Neuhart: Although clients usually brought to the office fixed notions about what they thought they wanted, Charles more often than not redefined the project and expanded its scope. )
To do this, you often have to make unexpected connections. Synthesis.
Where I come from, we like to think that doing research makes this happen faster, with more appropriate outcomes. We can learn from the Eameses that research isn't limited to user research and business and cultural research. Research can include going to the ballet or the Art Institute or to Steppenwolf or taking a walk along the lake picking up fallen leaves in different colors, and reading New Science Magazine, or an article in the Times about a bird fossil with a skull similar in size to that of a horse; inputs, inputs, inputs!
The Eames were the king and queen of inputs and outputs. Connect two unlikely things and then..
.
..
.prototype the synthetic explosion. Tell the story, and tell the story, then make it.
Write it down. Draw it. Fabricate a scenario.
Build it out of foam core. Describe it to a friend. Tell the story.
Can we talk about Milton Glaser? He's this guy I've never met but for whom I have reverence. Oh yeah, that's a prerequisite for revering people in my book, not knowing them.
Anyway, Mr Glaser is a designer, but his real magic is that he's an effing good illustratrator. And he designed the I heart NY logo and that psychedelic Bob Dylan poster.
There's something oddly sexy about Mr Glaser.
Oddly, yes, but sexy, yes. (I had a little glass of chardonnay, yes. But still, he is sexy.
)
I am avoiding my real teaching work; that is, avoiding telling my students what they think they want to know and think they need to know by telling them what they must know. Which, in this case, is Milton Glaser's speech, posted here, very abridged, ENTIRELY without permission:
- You can only work for people that you like.
- If you have a choice never have a job.
- Some people are toxic avoid them.
- Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
- Less is not necessarily more.
- Style is not to be trusted.
- How you live changes your brain.
- Doubt is better than certainty.
- Solving the problem is more important than being right.
- Tell the truth.
Okay, in bullet point form it doesn't amount to much.
I really do think you should to read the whole thing.
While you're at it, click and buy a poster. I don't know these fabulously hilarious and talented people either, but they did this likeness of Mr Glaser (see below, if you please) and I'm using it without permission and, dammit, it's sold out or I would buy THREE.
Illustration of Mr Glaser by in Madison, WI
Having students makes me remember what it was like to really, desperately want a career. I feel their excitement ("I bought this big white board!") and sense their indecision (maybe I should be at Stanford).
I tell them what I would have wanted to know when I was in their shoes, all the practical things that will complement the magic inside them, and I wonder if they know that what they'll get in school is incomplete -- they need to specialize! -- but that when they figure that out they can unleash their magic.
The magic is in making things.
I remember when I was twenty-three and I felt like a speck in the giant universe of everything. I wasn't convinced there was a reason to continue my speck existence. I thrashed and flailed in my head trying to find a reason to love life in spite of the fact that, eventually, we're all going to, well, you know.
(Die.) After a while I came up with my answer: I loved to make things. When I was making something I forgot to think about all that existential shit, and I felt level, peaceful.
Sometimes when I looked at what I made I felt joy.
I still feel the good feelings when I write or make something, a drawing that works. It's an addiction and it's exhausting and dangerously absorbing so that when I'm involved I neglect those I love.
I tell myself that's why I don't do it so much but I don't really think that's why I don't.
I hope my students feel the good feelings and I hope they stay in school and make things that change everything.
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