Jean Nouvel on design & architecture

Just found this while browsing through a recently acquired (like, this evening!) collection of old AXIS magazines, dating back to 1992, from a neighbor moving out and getting rid of stuff. AXIS is a fabulous Japanese magazine of design, art, architecture, featuring heavy paper stock and gorgeous photography, as well as deep interviews. Below are some quotes from an interview with Jean Nouvel, the French architect/urban planner:

Design is a question of essence; and at the same time it is also a question of exigency.

Architecture too is one of those cultural witnesses that give expression to the structures of feeling of its time. But in the case of architecture, there is a certain eternal quality of buildings as such. It is not possible to erect meaningless things. There is nothing wrong with objects created for a particular place, for someone’s collection. However, architecture must be equipped with ‘qualities’.

When I design architecture, I imagine where people will go once they have entered the building and what their pathways through the building will be like. The continuity of scenes that people pass through in a building is like the sequence of scenes in a movie, and that’s how I think about architecture. It’s all like framing in the movies.

Good inspiration for designing digital interactions!

What’s a “true” interaction designer?

Recently I ran into a former colleague from Oracle while meeting with the Cisco WebEx design team, an informal meet-n-greet session to share and learn about our different projects. After I presented some rather visually bold next-generation UI concepts, she asked me aside who did the compelling visuals. I casually indicated that I did, which prompted a reply of surprise: “Really! I thought you were a true interaction designer, doing only flows, wireframes, diagrams, you know that sort of thing.” To which I responded vaguely, yes well I’m a hybrid I guess, etc…

Yet I knew what she meant really, and I must admit that I’ve always found that somewhat annoying. It’s not her fault of course, but there is a general misperception that interaction designers don’t/can’t/won’t do “beautiful” designs, which are believed to be the province solely of “visual designers”. I don’t want to get into the sources and catalysts for this misguided belief here. (I suspect a slushy cocktail mix of poor HR job descriptions, lots of varying college courses, CHI, Jakob Nielsen, amateur web designers, AIGA’s early attempts at “experience design”, IA vs IxD territoriality, etc.) And I’ve previously stated at length on this blog the value of beauty and aesthetics and why beauty matters for IxD professionals, so I’ll avoid jumping onto that soapbox again ;-)

But my friend’s off-hand comment does make me pause about the broader issue of what it means to be a “true” interaction designer.

To be sure, this is not about a holy war over definitions about “interaction design” vs. “interface design” vs. “experience design”. Ugh! That’s been done ad nauseum elsewhere and just tires me out. No, what’s more crucial is a fundamental existential question, not an epistemological issue, of what it means to BE an interaction designer. It’s not about definition but about action and essence, the act of living and embodying the values of an IxD professional and expressing them in your work and life.

In my personal view (shaped by my own diverse work and academic circumstances) a “true” interaction designer:

– Believes in the human experience and seeks to enrich, enliven, enable the ultimate and highest quality of that experience, however that may manifest: products, interfaces, services, processes, etc.

– Is a champion of aesthetic value: visual, behavioral, sensual, etc. If you don’t give a damn about this (or unwilling to even attempt this), then you’re not a designer (interaction or otherwise), plain and simple. Sorry.

– Leads with a design process, but not beholden to it; willing to try new approaches to discover insights to old problems. Understands that innovation comes from diverse (and often unexpected) sources and starting points. I remember a brainstorm at Involution where the main UI concept came from the client’s CFO of all people!

– Does typical process artifacts like diagrams, flows, wireframes, site maps, system models, but with an eye towards how they shape the screens/widgets/components/behaviors (seeing both forest and trees, and the leaves!). Also is willing to skip ahead or jump back if needed…

– Sketches, draws, visualizes, iterates, prototypes, over and over again, to get better resolution of solutions for well-defined problems. The “spec” does not drive the designing no matter how hard the engineers or product managers throw a tantrum. Designing is a humanistic act of creativity, not rote mechanical documentation. That comes later.

– Takes pride in the craft of making a superb experience, always seeking to make it insanely better but knowing it will never be perfect. It’s not a Sisyphian task (rolling the boulder up a hill for eternity) but more of a zen thing.

– Leverages research (of users, of technology, of business) where appropriate to guide decision-making as needed but again, not beholden to it.

In sum, my view of a “true” interaction designer is really an informed visionary–embodying a perhaps mythical amalgam of talent, ingenuity, knowledge, craft, strategic thinking, trendsetting, and a ferocious will of spirit to command and deliver brilliant solutions.

Holding to that standard, I have a very long way to go! And frankly, so do many others ;-) But that’s ok. That’s what makes being an interaction designer an incredible lifelong journey. You gotta love it… or leave it!

When a CEO gets it

Ok, enough of Steve Jobs. So how about A.G. Lafley, from Procter and Gamble? From Business Week Online:

In his new book, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley explains the difference between the two methods: “Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

Again, this is from the C E fracking O, which makes a world of a difference in my view, as it symbolizes and expresses a profound understanding of design’s differentiating value, not limited to vapid “look we got user experience with our lickable buttons, rah rah” silliness. The fact that this guy groks the different flavors of creative thinking and has supported company-wide design workshops for various departments, this speaks well of Lafley’s commitment to cultivating a good design practice and culture in what presumably is a design-deficient yet bureaucratically process-laden company.

Design school frameworks

Below is based upon a reply I made to the ixda list re: design school frameworks…

Two personal anecdotes from design school:

1) My first graphic design class, I remember trying to get the hang of compositional space and laying out letters and image with the grid, etc. And I was trying too hard to be artsy. Prof came over, moved the elements around trying different arrangements (this is all paper pieces with hand-drawn letters, btw). I was blown away. I asked her what was she thinking about as she was organizing elements. And she walked me through a “framework” of person/space/word/image (i forget the actual words, but similar) which I found fascinating…That there’s a basic framework that guided her design actions in an intuitive manner because it had become her habit and evolved with her many years of experience, operating sub-consciously.

At that moment I realized that there is something specific and capable of being articulated that really separated communicative design from expressive art, which I found very powerful.

2) Dick Buchanan’s graduate design seminar, he wrote out the steps of a typical UCD process on the whiteboard, going on about the major steps, etc. When he concluded, I raised my hand and asked, “So if someone just walked in right now and memorized and did those steps, is that person then a designer?” And Dick just smiled sneakily, hinting something about the personal and the “noumenal”… hmmm!

I share these to show that designing actually balances both “frameworks” and “ingenuity” or “talent” (for lack of a better word) in a kind of back-and-forth dialogue, left/right brain if you will (a dialectical method). What we must avoid is heavy handed bureaucracy and stifling of creativity by forcing designers to march lockstep step after step, all mandatory, all documented and codified, etc. Else it becomes a crutch and kills inventive spirit, imho…