Posted: January 16th, 2012    By:    0 comments

Design as an activity

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We’ve been busy at Normative since the new year started. Our team has grown by three and we have a few new great projects. With this fresh start we’ve been sharing and testing out our methods, techniques and ways of working. This has presented a nice opportunity to put more thought into how we work.

To that end, I’ve found myself revisiting ‘design as an activity versus a process.’ We’ve naturally worked that way for a while, but as new folks join it’s good to articulate what that means in a more focused manner.

So, what is design as an activity?

Design as an activity is a mind set. It’s not vastly different from design as a process, but requires a different way of thinking about doing design. It means conducting a series of exercises (such as open and closed sorting of research data, sketching, prototyping, testing, image and word association, synthetical thinking, etc.) with the aim of creating tools for facilitating the design steps that follow. The tools include stuff like: moodboards, personas, mental models, wires, user flows, prototypes, page compositions, napkin sketches, etc; and these aren’t treated as deliverables, which involves working collaboratively with clients so they are participants in the exercises and users of the tools instead of recipients of deliverables.

Why does design as an activity work?

Movement
One great reason for designers to work this way is because it keeps things moving. Exercises build on each other and the tools that are created as outcomes facilitate moving to the next step.

Tools vs. Deliverables
Treating outcomes as tools allows designers to focus less on updating documentation and more on designing. Designers can be less focused on creating documentation and more focused on building tools that facilitate discussion, creation and synthesis.

Flexibility
Design as an activity allows for great flexibility. Designers can focus on the vision, or desired end-state, and not worry about following a ridgid process. Different exercises can be used at different times as needed. An exercise may be doing synthetical thinking on your train ride home from work (a big reason why it’s so hard for designers to track hours!)

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Posted: December 22nd, 2011    By:    0 comments

A Normative 2011

This has been an amazing and crazy year here at Normative. We’ve done lots of interesting work, had people come and go, lived through some serious building renovations, and as it nears 2012 we’re better than ever. We saw some interesting places this past year – Boulder, Philadelphia, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, and more. 2012 is shaping up to be another year of exciting new projects and travel.

Over the last year we really came together as a team, learning how to compliment each other’s skills and interests to make the best work. We keep raising our standards and expectations, and our team rises to the new level each time. We’re in planning mode now, getting ready to work on some huge projects in 2012 including a massive intranet, multi-screen video, robot arms, and new learning tools. It’s going to be a busy year, and we’ll keep posting the best of our work here.

The end of the year is always a time to reflect on what we’ve done well and what we could have done better. Our practice has been improving, but we’ve also become a little more hermit-like. In 2012 we’re going to blog more, speak more, share more, and get others involved in what we do. We’re starting things off with a bang with Interaction Design North in January, then speaking at Interaction’12 in Dublin, and the IA Summit in New Orleans.

I hope everybody had a great 2011, and that 2012 will be even better.

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Posted: December 20th, 2011    By:    2 comments

A scene from Normative

This is a pretty typical scene in one of the Normative project spaces. We tend to have projects explode all over the walls and boards, then leave it all there for the duration of the work. It makes it easy for designers to jump into the project when needed, and to work with clients and collaborators quickly.

This type of tangible work also helps with knowledge sharing and distribution within the team, sometimes called pattern loading. By working physically with the data our brains absorb the information in a different way, and we can do it with others allowing for serendipitous insights and synthesis.

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