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Summer’s End
Strange to call this the end of summer, by birthday not having even arrived yet, but it is in terms of my schedule. I only have two weeks left at Intuit after which I’ll move back to Pittsburgh (in a new a bigger apartment!), and then spend a few days in New York for the Adobe Design Achievement awards (ADAA), before having about a week to get my life together and start school. Yikes. I guess I haven’t mentioned the ADAA before: I don’t really like to toot my own horn to much, but it’s a big honor. My team from Basic Interaction with Shelley Evenson last fall has been picked as a finalist for our Flirtastic! project - so I’ll be headed to New York to attend the ceremony and find out if we won the grand prize (fingers crossed! fingers crossed!).
Work has been going well - I’ve gotten involved in a bit of a blogging competition, which is why I’ve rarely had the energy left to post on this, my own blog. We received an email from my boss’ boss a couple weeks ago saying that there were only a few weeks left of the first quarterly blog competition. The Experience Design team has an internal blog, you see, and they thought it would help encourage posting if the offered up an 8 gig iPod touch to the most prolific blogger. Well, that was a challenge (and potential reward) that I just couldn’t turn down, and so I have been desperately trying to catch up with and out-pace my boss in the blogging competition (I’m not there yet, but I’ve beengetting close). The down side, however, is that I never feel like posting on my own blog (and I’ve been so full of deep design insights 
I do have a few links that I’ve been meaning to put up though, so here they are:
Illustrator Jacob Charles Dietz does some of the coolest Sci-Fi art I’ve ever seen (if he could only stick to the buildings and machines and drop the cheesy big-breasted ladies his work would be downright spectacular).
And we no longer need to worry about people picking up when we only really wanted to leave a voicemail! Genius. And terribly terribly sad.
And some awesome design humor. What would happen if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging?
And finally, the following cartoon is just about my favorite thing in the world right now. It’s from The Rut, which has many more incredibly wonderful comics.
July 24th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Humor | No Comments »
More Bunnies!
I just can’t hop! I mean stop!
I introduce to you…
CYCLOPTO-BUNNY!!!
July 18th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Communication Design | 1 Comment »
Bunnies!
So I stumbled across the Bunny Mandala the other day while looking for interesting information visualizations to inspire me at work, and ever since I just can’t stop sketching bunnies! I love ‘em! And tonight I came home and made some in Illustrator. So here they are:
July 16th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Communication Design | No Comments »
Designing Design
I’ve been reading a book called “Toothpicks and Logos: Design In Everyday Life” by John Heskett, a professor at the Institute of Design (at the time of writing - 2002). Heskett, in discussing why my field is so hard to explain, offers the following as an example of the word “design’s” semantic variegation:
“Design is to design a design to produce a design.”
Heskett then goes on to show how every use of the word in that sentence is both grammatically correct and representative of a separate definition of the word.
I don’t believe that the problem of describing Design effectively is small or irrelevant. As a summer intern at Intuit I find myself working closely with engineers for the first time, and am often at a loss as to how to explain the value of what I do because I cannot properly define design. If I cannot define designs, then I cannot express the value of Design to people who have not worked with designers before, and I can’t expect them to seek out my contributions. I once wrote a paper on this where I described design as “finding, defining, and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products” but that definition requires quite a bit of definition itself. I believe that the root of the problem, as stated by Richard Buchanan, is that “design has no domain.” That is, design is a way of thinking and working that can be applied to any area of business (or otherwise), but which is not specific to any product type or activity.
July 10th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking | No Comments »