Internet Time KnowledgeBase: Design
Design
Instructional | User Interface | Learning Objects | Graphic | Web | Information Architecture | Visual Thinking | Software | Industrial
I am a designer.
Design Principles for Clock of the Long Now (Hillis)
design is not merely an indicator of esthetic taste, but a social phenomenon that both mirrors and shapes how we think. Whereas objects of art reflect the personal vision of their makers, manufactured goods - which are designed to be salable and profitable - tend to embody more generalized beliefs about society, and so ''can cast ideas about who we are and how we should behave into permanent and tangible forms.'' Modern office equipment in ''bright colours and slightly humorous shapes,'' for instance, can help perpetuate the myth that office work is fun; just as modern, streamlined kitchen appliances can underline the contemporary faith in progress and technological salvation. SOURCE
design tradeoffs
Balance...............................................Instability Symmetry..........................................Asymmetry Regularity...........................................Irregularity Simplicity...........................................Complexity Unity..................................................Fragmentation Economy...........................................Intricacy Understatement..................................Exaggeration Predictability.......................................Spontaneity Activeness..........................................Stasis Subtlety..............................................Boldness Neutrality...........................................Accent Transparency......................................Opacity Consistency.......................................Variation Accuracy............................................Distortion Flatness..............................................Depth Singularity.........................................Juxtaposition Sequentiality......................................Randomness Sharpness..........................................Diffusion Repetition..........................................Epicodicity
Tog's First Principles of Design
Anticipation Autonomy Color Blindness Consistency Defaults Efficiency of User Explorable Interfaces Fitts's Law Human-Interface Objects Latency Reduction Learnability Limit Tradeoffs Metaphors Protect the User's Work Readability Track State Visible InterfacesLiving with Your Users by Marc Rettig. This is the way all major projects should be planned. Absolutely wonderful.
The Ferrari 355 F1 has a clutch but no clutch pedal. A computer changes gears, using data downloaded from Michael Schumacher's Formula One races. Floor it and you experience Michael's greatest hits -- shocking, slamming shifts that expand one's sense of the possible.
The Design Dimension, Product Strategy & The Challenge of Global Marketing, Christoper Lorenz, 1986
The designer's personal attributes and skills are:
Design & marketing -- united in the search for meaningful distinction
Shaker Design Guidelines
Less is more.
Form follows function.
The one-size-fits-all approach to training ignores that people learn in fundamentally different ways. Most current training is highly discriminatory. Howard Gardiner
"The most outstanding design is that which is perfectly appropriate to what is trying to be accomplished."
"Design is one of the few tools that for every (dollar) you spend, you actually say something about your business." -- Raymond Turner, exec, BAA
"The designer's purpose is to stimulate curiosity, amusement and affection."
Achilli Castilgioni Alessi, Art & Poetry
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Beautiful Things & Ugly Things
Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy." Erik Adigard
Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. Paola Antonelli
Bruce Sterling lecture on Shaping Things to Come
An intriguing vision of design in a virtual world...
Interactive chips can identify anything.Once we name things, we can track them throughout their lifetime. Bruce called them spimes. It has a history, a trajectory. The recorded history of objects will be more valuable than the objects themselves. Imagine bar codes on objects. 30 years they didn't exist and now they are everywhere. Barcodes enabled accurate inventory, better market analysis, better flow of goods, and fewer human errors. 5 billion were scanned today. However, paper barcodes are obsolete.
Traditional barcodes tell only two things: the maker and the sort of object it is. Braun_coffeemaker. It is vulnerable to fraud, abuse, and degredation. The electronic product code will be more vulnerable -- but it will be 1000s of times more efficient.
Barcodes identify only a class of things. There's no fine detail. Far better with electronics to identify individual objects. RFIDs (pronounced R-fids) are tiny, cheap combinations of computers and radios. This enables an "internet of objects." Some protest. RFIDs create dossiers. The object is inert, the system that tracks it is alive; the tracking system is more valuable.
Local & global positioning. Locative technology. RFIDs have radar. You can hear them while they move. An RFID inventory can be automated. Powerful Search Engines. Google local beta. In the internet of objects, a search engine will be able to tell you where anything is. Virtual design. We can work with the electronic plans of the objects. Before those objects physically exist. Often a virtual model (interactive, weightless, manipulable) serves me better. Gravity, friction, raw material...I don't need any of that. I can change, copy, restore, and save digital models as many times as I want.I have an object processor. I can email this. Computer fab. I'll use a 3D printer, a fabricator. My virtual model has become the crucial part of the object. The model is the command and control aspect of the object; it is the entity. Say it's 30 years from now. You call up a Spime. It's not created until you want it to me. After the purchase, manufacture, and delivery of your object, a link is made to a list of its ingredients, history of design, position history, recipes for customization, a public forum for discussion of your Spime, and the Blue Book value, should you care to sell it, and links to service centers. Cradle-to-cradle recycling. At the end of its useful life, it is deactivated. It is smart garbage. It's data lives on for analysis, but the object is put back into the manufacturing stream. The Spime is a set of relationships first and always, and an object only now and then.
Imagine my shoe is a Spime. No product lasts forever. Once my shoe is a Spime, fully trackable from beginning to end; the shoe is a momentary entity, a pause in time. It evanesced. History is our one inexhaustible resource.
The Psychology of Everyday Things by Don Norman
keys to good design:
1. provide a good conceptual model
2. make things visible
3. good mapping
4. feedback
A reminder is (1) a signal and (2) a message. (use different signals with different messages....)
why designers go astray:
1. aesthetics put first2. they're not typical users
principles for design:
1. use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.design model <-> system image <-> user's mode
"In the best of worlds, the manuals would be written first, then the design would follow the manual."
2. simplify the structure of tasks
Short term memory can't hold more than 5 (some say 7) unrelated items at once; the mitations of long term memory mean that info is better and more easily acquired fi it makes sense, if it can be integrated into some conceptual framework. moreover, retrieval from long term memory is apt to be slow and contain errors. limitations on attention are also severe.provide mental aids.
3. make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation4. get the mappings rightExploit natural mappings. make sure that the user can determine the relationships: between intentions and possible actions, between actions and their effects on the system, between actual system state and what is perceivable by sing/sound/feel, between the perceived system state and the needs, intentions and expectations of the users
5. exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial6. design for error (Murphy's always there)7. when all else fails, standardizeThe nice thing about standardization is that no matter how arbitrary the standardized mechanism, it has to be learned only once. People can learn it and use it effectively.
Remember, standardization is essential only when all the necessary information cannot be placed in the world or when natural mappings cannot be exploited. The role of training and practice is to make the mappings and required actions more available to the user, overcoming any shortcomings in the design, minimizing the need for planning and problem solving.
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context--a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.--Eliel Saarinen
Instructional design
Internet Time Group Methods of delivering eLearning
Time Capsule of Training and Learning from Big Dog
Product Development Process from Payback Training (now Avaltus)
Characteristics of a Complete eLearning System (Hambrecht)
Instructional Design and Learning Theory
Theory into Practice Database 50 theories relevant to learning and instruction
from the University of Denver School of Education: Theoretical Sources | Instructional Design Models Instructional Design in Distance Education (IDDE) database of instructional theories and tactics to support the design of effective distance education
Training magazine's April 2000 issue had a wonderful article debunking the effectiveness of traditional instructional systems design (ISD). Why is ISD obsolete?
- It's too slow and clumsy to meet today's training challenges.
- There's no “there” there.
- Used as directed, it produces bad solutions.
- It clings to the wrong world view.
here's more on the subject...
Roger Shank's delightful Top Ten Mistakes in Education
The implications of the research literature on learning styles for the design of instructional material, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 1999
International Society for Performance Improvement
History of Instructional Design
Big Dog and Glossary
Yale Web Style Guide
Distributed Learning: Approaches, Technologies and Solutions
Lotus Institute (1996)
Fred Nichols
(This is why HPT won't work. It's Taylorism in new clothing.)
(It's a joke. Don't get bent out of shape.)
Remember: knowledge work must be configured not prefigured.
It is the day-to-day stuff of leading people, not of managing them or their work, that really affects productivity; it's the hand-holding, the encouraging, the going to bat for people, and the sharing of the hardships, the risk, the recognition, and the rewards that tempts people to contribute and sustains them as they strive for excellence. These leadership behaviors must themselves be configured not prefigured. In other words, conformity at the executive level is as deadly as compliance at the working level.
To sum it up, the era of compliance has ended, and with it has ended the dream of engineering individual human performance. The era of individual contribution has just begun and we don't even have a vocabulary suited to discuss the issue let alone formulate decisions and then carry them out.
Roger Schank interview with Cappuccino, Deloitte
"Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called "objects") that can be reused in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. Learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions. These are significant differences between learning objects and other instructional media that have existed previously."
So states the online version of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a complete book on learning objects by David Wiley, David Merrill, Wayne Hodgins, and a host of others. Wiley: "Atoms, not Legos."
Cisco's Reusable Learning Object Strategy. 
Objects of Interest, a nice intro
Terms like classes or courses don't capture the essence of personalized learning. I'm starting to think in terms of learning experiences. Here, between the section on instructional Design and User Interface Design, is the ideal spot to point out a really practical site, Good Experience.
Instructional Systems Design
1. Assess 2. Design 3. Develop 4. Instruct 5. Evaluate
Instructional Design grew up building courses. Courses are being supplanted by eLearning experiences. A new discipline is called for,