One tiny megaphone
Some early thoughts on the subject.
A lot of people are hybrids. There are personality hybrids, perhaps having both introverted and extroverted tendencies. There are cognition hybrids, having both strong analytical and emotional capacities. There are cultural hybrids, who may have become so by spending meaningful parts of their lives in more than one culture. You name it. The list is long.
The scenario: You’ve been hired to do some design work, you’ve submitted the deliverables, and they were accepted. You maybe even got paid. The client later comes back and asks you to change something in a way that you think breaks the design in an unacceptable way. What do you do?
Continue reading “Design bind: Can you make the logo bigger?”
I had a discussion recently with someone about a not entirely uncommon situation consultants can find themselves in. You get hired to solve a problem, but the reason they have hired the work out rather than do it internally is because they aren’t really committed to making the project a success. What do you need to know to best deal with this situation?
Continue reading “Designed to fail: An absence of commitment”
The open source community has produced a number of serviceable tools for two-dimensional design. These include GIMP for bitmap graphics and photo editing, Inkscape for vector art, and Scribus for page layout. On the 3D side, Blender, Wings 3D, Art of Illusion, and a few others have served the needs of those doing surface and subdivision modeling. And while lots of good work has been done using those tools, I haven’t found surface and subdivision modelers very useful for industrial design work, except for occasional rapid ideation or visualization. FreeCAD is different in that it’s a parametric modeling tool, which has a history of effective use in ID.
Continue reading “FreeCAD for Industrial Design”
It happens sooner or later to all consulting designers: your client decides not to use your work or — if it’s what they hired you for — take your advice.
Now what?
I’m teaching myself React, the JavaScript library du jour that’s meant “for building user interfaces.” Interestingly, it doesn’t use a templating language. Instead it offers JSX: an extension of the JavaScript language that lets you write JS code that looks very much like HTML and that can be rendered into HTML. On the surface this seems like a cool idea, but the apparent simplicity starts to break down when you want to do anything other than straight-line HTML.
Continue reading “Designing out designers?”
It’s common in the web and app development industry for stakeholders to make a distinction between “designers” and “developers”. One of the things I’ve noted about this distinction is that it opens the door to antagonistic perceptions and even behaviors between the two camps. At a conference a few years ago, in the presence of developers expressing disparaging views regarding designers, I suggested that, “Designers are developers.” The deafening silence suggested I had to explain what I meant:
I haven’t had the chance to do so in the last couple years, but this year I was finally able once again to help critique student work for Barry Kudrowitz’s Toy Product Design course at the University of Minnesota. It’s always great to see the interdisciplinary reach Barry’s work is achieving.
You often hear that to work with graphic displays on the Arduino platform you need to use a Mega or other high-performance board. I got curious about how much you can actually get done on an a measly Uno and similar boards based on the classic ATmega328P. You can find the ongoing results on my wiki.
The story so far: 128×64 and smaller monochrome displays are usable. The smallest TFT displays much less so.
With the mainstream shift away from desktop to mobile devices, it seems the relevance of open source ecosystems is diminishing. The two major mobile OSes have a very effective grip on the mobile OS space, and they have engendered app models that do little to encourage or motivate open source designers and developers. So now might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the benefits that open source confers. Continue reading “Open source for equitable futures”
