An interview with the technologists behind frog design’s augmented-reality SXSW Interactive fiesta.
Ten Steps to Becoming the Designer You Want to Be
By Laura Richardson – March 10, 2010
Photo (cc) by Flickr user Leo Reynolds.
An open letter to the next generation of designers, part 1.
Everyone has moments in their career when they look back and think, “If I had only known then what I know now….” After 15-plus years as a designer and design researcher at places like IBM, Trilogy, M3 Design, and now frog design, I know I certainly have. Which is why, now that I’m a veteran, I’d like to give share some advice with young designers just starting out. If I could be your mentor, this is what I would tell you:
- Get the book
We all have a book that grabbed us by the throat and never let go, forever changing how we look at our profession. For me, that book was Sparks of Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. The design process is, ultimately, the ability to creatively solve problems—and in our profession, we need to be better at it than most.- Get the obscure book you’ve never heard of
While it’s an older book, The All New Universal Traveler – A soft-systems guide to creativity, problem solving and the process of reaching goals is still juicy today. It was written by architecture professors from California Polytech and the School of Architecture and Environmental Design, and presents a ton of research condensed into a tightly packed form.- Choose a topic that fascinates you and learn it inside out
This is how you become an expert. Your topic might be as broad as sustainability, or as narrow as a specific method like body storming. Over the last 10 years, I took on three provocative topics—emotional design, design research, and participatory design—and I just recently look on another: synesthesia.- Write, blog, and speak on that topic
You’re an expert once you feel comfortable calling yourself an expert. Take Jakob Nielsen, who began blogging about usability back in the late 1990s. He became recognized as the source on usability because he was consistently churning out information on the topic. Were there other experts on usability? Sure. But Nielsen developed the early point of view, and wrote provocatively about the subject.- Learn Something New Every Day
Every designer should be on a quest to see the world with fresh eyes every day. This might be learning something—a bit of trivia, perhaps—that helps you see the world a little differently. For example, today I learned that cats can’t taste sugar. This may sound trivial, but it could lead to a whole host of ideas. And so could the fact that they have hooks on their tongue to lap up water.- Create a New Idea Every Day
At one point I was twittering a new idea every day. (Example: “Product Idea #1: Skin Pens > did you ever write notes on your hand? i still do. i want a pen for skin writing on the go.”) Now I file them manually. People will say that ideas are a dime a dozen, but I think they’re wrong: I think the first 10 might be worth a dime, but the last two could be worth their weight in gold. I would suggest that the designer without an idea isn’t a designer. Record them, capture them, and go back to them.- Experiment
Good designers experiment. One of my favorite examples is from fellow frog Michael McDaniel, who conceived of portable housing after Hurricane Katrina. When he didn’t get immediate interest from government agencies, he built a full prototype in his backyard. I’ve experimented with measuring emotion through sound, and a scent alphabet, to name a few. When you do experiment, push the edges.- Learn as many frameworks as you can
In 2008, a design team at M3 (where I was working at the time) went through 400 design research methods, reduced the redundancy, and then sorted the remaining 250. This exercise, while daunting, was incredible: For the first time, a designer could see the research methods, or “frameworks,” that existed in the design space. The point is, you should get comfortable moving beyond just brainstorming and start structuring data in such a way that it drives insight and innovation. When you get comfortable with many frameworks, you’ll start creating your own. The only caveat is not to rely on them, because not everything can be modeled in a framework that already exists.- Choose variety over anything else
I turned down an offer that paid more to come work at frog. I’ve never regretted that decision. If anything, frog has made me crave variety in such a way that I doubt I’ll ever be able to commit to just one industry. I’ve done everything from cell phone interaction design to social networking strategy, and from the future of electric vehicles to emotional medical identification. I would recommend to anyone that when you stop learning, it’s time to move on.- Model or draw (all the f*@#ing time)
To be good at anything, you need to do it a lot. And to be really, really good, you need to do it all the time. I don’t care how great an idea is, if you can’t model it, prototype it, or draw it, then you’re screwed. If you learn nothing else from this blog post, please find a way to learn how to make your ideas tangible. This can be through graphic design, sketching and rendering in Alias, a flash prototype, photography, video, whatever. Just learn the tools of the tangible.To be continued…
The Invisibles
The working homeless are too often unseen. One woman brought her story from the streets to the stage at TEDGlobal.
By Becky Blanton
Three years ago, I was living in a van with my Rottweiler and a housecat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the US. By July 2009, I was speaking at TEDGlobal in Oxford, England. Physically, the journey from “homeless” to an international stage was a rough one, but the emotional and mental challenges were greater. I was one of the lucky ones.
We all make bad choices. But when I decided to quit my $50,000-a-year job as a small town newspaper editor in 2006 to deal with my father’s recent death from cancer, I had no idea I was deciding to become homeless.
I thought I was doing something good for myself by taking time off to travel and see the country. My father, a man who had physically, emotionally, and sexually abused me throughout my childhood, had died in February of that year, and his passing hit me hard.
No matter how much you’re told about how the death of an abuser may affect you, no one can prepare you for it. So when that emotional storm hit, I ran. I retreated into the one world I felt safe in — camping and traveling. I told myself I was “taking care of me.” How wrong I was.
Although I was freelancing, and sometimes working a second part-time job, the co-workers, employers, police, and people around me considered me homeless and “less than,” because I lived in my van, and not in an apartment. At a time when I needed friends, encouragement, and understanding, I got harassed, shunned, and shamed.
For more than a year I bathed in employee showers and truck stops, washed up in public restrooms, parked in different lots each night to avoid police hassles, and struggled to keep my clothes cleaned and presentable, and my job intact. I sweated in the heat, froze in the cold. When I was sick, I used a bucket and trash bag for a toilet. I went without food so I could afford gas, and I risked my health, safety, and security every day. The only difference between me and my former colleagues at the newspaper was that they paid a mortgage or rent on a home. I paid rent on a storage unit.
My depression deepened, and eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic. I went. I hadn’t bathed in three days. I was as smelly and depressed as anyone in line; I just wasn’t drunk or high. When they realized that, several of the homeless men, including a former university professor said, “Why are you really here? You aren’t homeless.” Other homeless people didn’t see me as homeless, but I still did. The professor listened to my story and said, “You have hope. The real homeless don’t have hope.”
At some point someone told me that the journalist Tim Russert had included an essay I wrote about my father before he died in a new, best-selling book. At first, I laughed. Was I a writer or was I a homeless woman? I went into a book store and found Russert’s book. I stood there and reread my essay and cried. I knew then the answer to my question. I was a writer.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 2.5 to 3.5 million people — about the population of Denver, Colorado — experience homelessness each year in the United States. That includes 600,000 families and 1.35 million children. Many of them live in a family vehicle because they are able to find and maintain a job, or had a vehicle before their crisis hit.
Studies show the most economically efficient way to end homelessness is to prevent it in the first place. The most common cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing; it accounts for 50 percent of all reasons given. Emergency assistance (including rent or mortgage and utility assistance), which helps provide time-limited housing subsidies until families become financially stable, can help prevent homelessness and is more financially effective than getting someone off the street.
So instead of handing a homeless person $5 or $10, contribute $10 or $20 to your local energy company when you pay your utility bill each month. It will go towards helping someone keep the home they already have. Donating to businesses or groups that can provide car repair, transportation, rent and food, or medical care to people in need can also help. Rather than volunteer at the local soup kitchen on Thanksgiving and Christmas, why not help set up a crisis clinic or donate time at a free health clinic?
Pity isn’t a solution. Practical, political expediency is. Providing safe parking, allowing the homeless to use public resources such as parks, showers, transportation, and libraries will help thousands of families get off the streets or out of their cars quicker. Getting your local government to decriminalize homelessness is harder than spending the morning at a soup kitchen, but the payoff is so much greater.
After realizing I had a skill I could use, I moved back home to Tennessee, alternated between living in my van and couch-surfing with friends, and I started writing. By the following summer, I was a working journalist, winning awards and living in my own apartment, no longer homeless or invisible.
It’s superficial, but society equates having a permanent address and a permanent structure to live in with having value and worth as a human being. I used to not believe that. I do now.
Becky Blanton, a writer, won an essay contest organized by author and TEDGlobal speaker Daniel Pink, and traveled with him to the conference. She told her story at TED University.
Wounded Man
Author and TEDGlobal attendee Andreas Salcher talks about why early childhood scars break some people and motivate others to do exceptional things.
Interview by Tim Leberecht
Andrea Mantegna’s “St. Sebastian (Der Hl. Sebastian).” Musée du Louvre, Paris
In your book The Wounded Man you describe how an accumulation of the “many little hurts” from childhood can lead to severe psychic wounds. You argue that some people can turn these wounds into success while others are broken by them. What is it that distinguishes the “successful” from the “unsuccessful” among those who’ve been hurt?
The difference between winners and losers — that is, between those who are able to turn wounds into great skills and those who are broken by them — can be summarized as personal responsibility instead of fatalism. It doesn’t matter how seriously, how often, or how unfairly winners have been hurt, they never feel like helpless victims. Winners certainly don’t suffer less than losers, yet they always feel that they are personally responsible for their lives. The key question is what meaning different individuals attribute to their wounds. At some point, successful people are able to accept their wounds and integrate them into their life story. This is both a lifelong task and a cumbersome path. However, it’s a path that eventually leads to reconciliation with oneself and the world.
What is it that our society could or should be doing? Should we attempt to prevent their wounds beforehand, or should we acknowledge and support the wounded ones more openly?
Past scars naturally belong in our lives — that’s why we can’t prevent them. Each of us has already hurt others, and each of us has already been hurt by others. However, each day, we have the choice not to hurt others. Simple questions are often helpful: Is this good for me? Is it good for the other person? Would I be willing to accept that kind of behavior for myself? The positive forces within us are much more powerful than the devastating forces. The first lesson is to awaken the deep desire in your heart to become a better person.
Do you think that the current fundamental crisis of capitalism will help us reconsider our interpersonal relationships? Are we experiencing a new era of morality and cordiality, or is this just a transitional phenomenon?
What we fear most today is that we might lose our identity with our business cards. Money, power, and fame are three major negative driving forces within human beings. Fortunately, there’s an even more powerful driving force within us: the desire to be loved. Once human beings have lost their faith in love, they either start to devote their entire life to accumulating money, power, and fame, or they start to build high walls to protect themselves and live in silent resignation. However, all of this can’t satisfy their ardent desire for love. I don’t believe that humans will become more ethical all of a sudden [because of the economic crisis], but I do believe that many people are currently confronted with existential questions, which is very good.
Do some cultures have a higher developed “school of heart” than others?
Individual freedom and the striving for efficiency have a higher priority in Western cultures than they have in cultures in which community and equality are considered more important. Both concepts have advantages and disadvantages. However, there are two areas that Western cultures undoubtedly need to learn more about: dealing with the elderly and with death. When you travel to countries with a significantly lower living standard, you easily get the impression that there is no developing country in which the elderly are treated with less respect than in developed cultures. This doesn’t have anything to do with medical standards (these are much higher in our societies); it’s about the significance of older people and about dignity. Simone de Beauvoir once asked herself: “What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?” And she immediately responds to this question: “The answer is simple: He would always have to have been treated as a man.” Our society creates “wounded men” through the subtle hurting of children. The “school of heart” starts with vigilance.
Andreas Salcher is an author and the creator of the Waldzell conference. His latest book is The Wounded Man (“Der verletzte Mensch“). He attended TEDGlobal.
