After several fits and starts I’m finally getting serious (maybe!) and writing a book based upon my professional experience as a designer in Silicon Valley. Whew. Let’s see if this works :-)
So far I’m thinking it will be written, designed, and published by me, as a purely knowledge-driven creative endeavor.
My ultimate intention is to have a series of 3 books: Mastering Design, Advancing Design, and Reinventing Design…every ten years! Yes, the grand scheme is a 30 year project. So I should be 65 when it all ends ;-) Actually I’ve completed my first ten years so hopefully the next two decades will fly by.
What will be the focus? Mastering Design, the first book, will detail my own particular journey of “mastering design” post-graduation from CMU, emphasizing the core themes that emerged in the course of working at a variety of contexts/situations, the critical best practices that enabled my growth and evolved “view of design”, and some projections of the future of designing for hi-tech products / services / systems.
Note: It is admittedly very much biased towards Silicon Valley view of things, since that’s my frame of reference so far.
This is not a how-to methods or techniques book, nor a book about general design field, nor an introductory text for total newbies to see if they like design as a career. Hmm, actually it might be something useful for newbies… My target audiences are really those in the field of UX / IxD / UI design early in their careers, struggling to make sense of the chaos of multiple clients, tedious corporate projects, with intellectually articulate language that provides structure, relevance, and guidance to the issues of designing hi-tech embodiments.
The book will have three general content sections:
1. Emergent Themes
2. Critical Practices
3. Cautious Futures
And of course introductions and epilogues, etc. I want to frame the overall text as a “hero’s journey” in a sense, that is still very much ongoing. Another aspect is the nature of “being thrown into a situation”…The chapters will be very much personal reflections, with anecdotes, references to other texts and designers, and of course plenty of real examples from my own work and those in popular parlance like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.
This is all evolving in my mind (and sketchbooks as I sketch out ideas, outlines, etc.) so stay please tuned…