Same difference. Left to right, @antlersanchors, @readywater, @blairjohnsrude, @emenel

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!)

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.

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.

My answer is that to be a master designer you need to understand all of those things. “But that’s too much, one person can’t understand all those skills.” That’s the most common reply… How you you be a great interaction designer, and learn to code, and learn typography, and understand systems, etc, etc…?

I’m starting to feel that the reason designers get so defensive when it’s suggested that they need to learn other skill sets is that we’re trying to do it all too fast. We’ve been taught by the tech dominant culture in North America that we need to be the best we are going to be by the time we’re 30, otherwise you might be too old and no hot startup will hire you. This is a really unfortunate state of mind.. In reality design is a complex, multi-faceted, cross-disciplinary practice that takes decades to master. Designers also need to become experts in different contexts, environments, and domains. We have to apply the wide range of skills we acquire or wrangle in different businesses, organizations, and other endeavours. If we start thinking about our peak practice at 50 years old instead of 30 we now have a much more realistic timeline for mastering this complex craft.

There are some people who display raw talent at a young age, but few show designerly wisdom. Design is complex and requires continual learning. In order to master all the things that allow you to be a truly great designer it takes time and practice. We tend to think in 2 to 5 year scales, maybe we need to be thinking in longer time lines about our own careers and skills.

Starting and running my own design business has made me a lot more Zen for too many reasons to count. In my emerging Zen-driven approach to team building, I don’t focus so much on retaining people as I do in getting the most out of their time in our studio while they’re here – and that’s going to be different for every team member. If they add value to the company as they pass through, I’m thankful. If we’re lucky, they’ll pass through more than once during their career.

I love the idea of someone returning after their own voyage of career discovery to bring back a fresh, but well-framed perspective to the team.

We’ve got someone returning to the studio this week after spending the last year and a half somewhere else. We’re super excited – the growth in this individual has been amazing, and I can’t wait to see how they impact our evolution as a team as they pass through this time.

(cross-posted to: http://mmilan.tumblr.com/post/14169094127/the-value-of-passing-through)

One of the questions was about books we would recommend for new designers, or anybody looking for something different or inspiring. I thought I’d post a short list here so that it’s recorded and can be shared more easily. I’ve divided it into a couple sections for ease of browsing. Also, this is really just a list… if you have any questions about a specific book ask in the comments on get me on Twitter. I didn’t link these to any book store because I don’t want to endorse a specific retailer. You can find these at all major online book sellers, and many local book stores.

Theory

Notes on The Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander

The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich

Thoughtful Interaction Design, Jonas Lowgren

Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss

Abstracting Craft, Malcolm McCullough (also belongs in Practice)

Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough

History

Designing Interaction, Bill Moggridge

Designing for Interaction, Dan Saffer (this book spans history, theory, and practice.. a great foundation book)

Practice

Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton

Exposing the Magic of Design, Jon Kolko (this one is half theory, half practice, and all awesome)

Communicating Design, Dan Brown

Getting Started with Arduino, Massimo Banzi

All of the A Book Apart series

Inspiration

Talk to Me, Paola Antonelli

Anathem, Neal Stephenson

The Garden of Forking Paths,  Jorge Luis Borges

Not really a book, but take a look at the works of David Rokeby and Norman White for some great inspiration.

I could go on, but this is probably good for now. If you have any specific interests around new media art, electronics, responsive environments, web, software, storytelling, or anything else just ask and I can provide more specific recommendations for those topics as well.

UPDATE:

A great suggestion from Andrew Lovett-Baron, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

I also added two Malcolm McCullough books that I can’t believe I forgot to put on the list.

We will be teaching a full day workshop outlining the core elements of design school curriculum and practice. Dave and I each come at this from different perspectives. Dave didn’t go to design school, he has learned on the job and by participating in our great community. He became so engaged in interaction design and thinking about design that he has now become an interaction design professor at SCAD, which gives him an amazing perspective on design education. On the other hand, I attended art and design school and have a degree in New Media Art. My education wasn’t specifically around interaction design, but the foundation taught in art school is core to any design practice. In the end, we’ve both had kind of round about ways of becoming interaction designers and feel that there is something special about the design school experience.

In our workshop we’ll attempt to give attendees a taste of what it’s like being a design student, at the same time covering a lot of the foundational elements that practitioners often miss when they get into the field through other routes. If you’re planning to attend Interaction12 (and you should be!) we’d love to see you at our workshop.

What you missed by skipping design school at Interaction12 Dublin, February 1 – 4, 2012.

So, you see, graphic design is not Visual Design. And given that the look of something –- in my mind at least — can’t be considered holistically without the feel of it, or the use of it, then how can Visual Design be separated as not only a step in a process, but as a job title? Good graphic designers concern themselves with the What, the Who, and the How. The message, the audience and the mechanics. Which is what we do on the web. If you feel the need to call it something, can we call it what it’s always been called? Let’s just call it graphic design.

Mark Boulton, one of my favourite designers on the web, wrote these very wise words on his blog. He’s lamenting the fact that in much of the “UX” world we’ve started referring to graphic design as “visual design,” and thus it looses the depth of practice of real graphic design. In my experience, many of the designers working in the digital industry aren’t really graphic designers by any real standard and are more deserving of the title Visual Designer. This is a major loss for design and the web in general, and to Mark’s point, devalues real graphic design for digital products.

Mark’s post brought to mind a couple big things:

We need to learn, understand, and embrace design history, theory, and practice if we want to have a mature discipline that’s taken seriously. That’s a terrible sentence, but a really important message. There is a rich history for design of all types including education, theory, techniques, and lots more. If we don’t learn these things we’re going to keep reinventing things, and more importantly, we’re going to miss the real depth of why we do certain things and end up only retaining the surface. This is at the heart of Visual versus Graphic design argument, and my previous ranting about UX versus Interaction Design.

Good design practice (whether Graphic, Interaction, Industrial, Fashion, Interior, or other) is grounded in the same need to understand context, constraints, use, and the human condition. All design practice starts with understanding aspects of these things, then going through a process of exploration and synthesis to come out with a solution to the problem at hand. If you’re not doing these things in some form then you really are doing Visual Design.