I can remember some great ‘aha!’ moments in my time designing. You know, when things suddenly gel for you, and the lights turn on. When I reflect on them as milestones in my career and growth of understanding, they’re helpful to shape the journey of what I think is important in design, and for designers to know. This post is an attempt to catalogue and reflect a little on some of these moments, to see if I can learn something from them.
There's a call for your aha moments at the end too!
Hacking
I think the first lesson I learnt about design was when I was about 4. For a while we lived on a farm, and I had a chicken wire enclosed first floor cubby house in the tank stand. I had an old wind up telephone to play with and had somehow realized that you could get a shock from it if you wound it up and touched it in a certain place. Thereafter, most (first) visits of friends involved showing them my telephone. When I think back to what this taught me, I remember being amazed that things like a telephone could be used for different purposes than talking. In reflection, this sounds a lot like my first hacking experience.
Now I come to think of it, kids gain a lot of design knowledge through experimentation and the resulting experience. Our three year old is forever inventing new and whacky ways to ‘use’ things. I’m reminded of Alan Kay’s thoughts on instrumental reasoning when I wonder where all this hacking goes to in adults.
Snakes and Singing
School taught me a lot of lessons in design. One of the biggest involved me being put in hospital by a snake. My sister, brother and I went to Two Mile State School on the other side of town. Two Miles on the other side, to be exact. When I say small, I mean 28 students and one teacher, in one room with a blackboard at either end. Grades 1-4 looked at one end, 5-7 at the other. There wasn’t much that you didn’t hear.
So, back to the snake. The school was in Gympie, Queensland, and it was hot in summer. We didn’t wear shoes much. One afternoon we had stopped at a friends place on the way home, just mucking around. I walked through a doorway and felt an electric shock go right up my leg. Looking down I saw a snake trapped under the door I’d just opened! I ran into tell mum
“I’ve just been bitten by a snake!” to which she replied,
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not getting out of swimming training that easily.”
I came back from hospital two days later, and our teacher had organised the school (all 27 of them) to write a song about me. We sang it. I can remember the final verse ending in
“…and he keeps his shoes and socks on all the time!”
I remember being surprised that everyone had joined in, and that I heard about the song from people who weren’t directly associated with the school. The song had a life of its own, and I was fascinated with that. In recent years I’ve started to see this moment as one of my first experiences of the way participation and co-creation can build understanding and awareness in a group, and how artifacts aren’t necessarily things that you can ‘drop on your foot’.
Design Exists
High school. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a great art department. We had one semester where we looked at design, and I can remember one activity vividly. We were split into teams and all given a set number of lengths of doweling (circular section timber rods), plastic golf balls with holes that fit the doweling, and a sheet of heavy fabric. The task was to build a bridge that spanned a set gap, using just the balls and doweling, so that it could support the weight of the fabric. That taught me iteration and, to some extent, collaboration. But the biggest realization I remember having was that there was this thing you could do that wasn’t art – but it was creative, it wasn’t tech drawing or maths – but it was analytical. It helped marry all the aspects I loved in the subjects I excelled at, and it had a name: design.
Kill yr Idols
In first year Architecture I remember realizing that I’d fallen in love with a staircase I had designed and drawn. It was just so damn cool. Unfortunately it was directing the situation, form & concept of the building it was attached to. Badly. I think this was my first conscious comprehension of the implications of design processes, the dynamic relationship between concept and form, and the double edged power of fidelity in design communication. It took me a long time to realize that was what I realized, so up until then I just called it my “staircase moment”.
UX & Performance
There’s a big gap here where I played in bands and seemingly had a hiatus from design. My main learning from this is that music and performance bring a great deal to design, particularly when design is informed by an idea of how people will experience your design. I've recently started playing music again, and am realizing the effect it has on how I think. More on that next
Process Matters
A few years back it slowly dawned on me that managing research was not as much fun as doing research, but I seemed to be stuck in a role that didn’t allow for a design approach. I looked at what I was spending my time on and realized that 80% of my work was written, often in hideous templates. I hated this part. The other 20% of my work was talking with people, which I loved. So I started to sketch. Alone and in meetings with colleagues, clients & stakeholders, I would draw ideas. I stopped writing as much and started using whiteboards and big sheets of paper. This was an instinctual response to the situation, but on reflection I can see that it changed the way I thought. It also changed the way my collaborators thought. Sketching and diagramming got me back into being a designer, doing design. Sketching helped me realize that design, like knowledge, is a social action.
A little after that, I was playing planning poker with my team, and realized that agile was what you get when you apply design principles to product development. Designers can design the way they work with others, and this can have an enormous impact on the outcomes of those collaborations.
These are just a few instances of ‘aha!’ moments in my design life. Thanks for hanging in there up till now. I’m interested in other people’s experiences of these kinds of moments.. When did you realize something that changed the way you designed? When did you ‘grok’ experience informed design?
I’m interested in this because I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be hosting an Interaction Design Fundamentals activity http://www.ixda.org/interaction/activities/index.html#JeremyYuille at Interaction11 in Boulder this February! Its a great honor to be asked to do this, and I’m planning how to introduce interaction design to people new to the field. I want to involve people in activities rather than a lecture.
To inform my design of this primer, I’m want to hear what ‘aha!’ moments you’ve had related to ixd, ux, or design in general.
