Kickoff: What is design work?
Defining your role as a designer is difficult as expectations of your work increase in complexity.
I feel it is important to acknowledge much of my writing on this this website will generally be about design. Here is a philosophical kickoff.
As a user experience and user interface designer at Steamclock, I wear a lot of hats. I cross the lines of creative direction, user experience, user interface, visual design, and front-end development. My line of work is interdisciplinary. When thinking about what I do, I understand it as a series of tests to find the best solution for a visual problem. These tests involve shaping content. I test visual possibilities to find a pleasing way to interact with content on screens.
The work requires investigation into technical constraints, and prototyping to see how drawings transcribe onto mobile devices as interactive layouts. I communicate with people, to understand how goals, assumptions, expectations, time and budget limitations, feature requests, and bad ideas put pressure on the entire project. All of these things can change the detail of an icon, the shape of a button, or the placement of a picture in the UI.
The Unfinished Business episode Michael Parkinson on the adverts is thoughtful discussion about the issues involved with planning, building, and how far we should go as designers to output our ideas. Andrew Clarke and Elliot Kember discuss the definitions of “code” and “programming” in relation to The Year of Code; a campaign championed by Lottie Dexter.
We are programming the computer using a programming language, which is different from web development, with HTML and CSS. Those two things are different. We are not conflating the two things together and saying ‘code’. That’s what irks me and I think irks a lot of other people. It makes it sound as if coding is one homogeneous thing. I know it’s the same thing(homogeneous) when you’re sitting there and literally writing in a text editor … Writing HTML requires a different set of skills to writing … Javascipt.
– Andrew Clarke, Unfinished Business, Episode 57 — 45:20
It doesn’t matter! These are the things you discover as you’re doing it … You get there through lots of time — doing it … I’m the biggest language pedant in the world. I’m the semicolon guy. I know when to use them but … when it comes to the meaning and difference of two words, which are both very new … it’s immaterial. The words are still gaining their meaning. I think it detracts from the whole point of teaching more people how to do this important fourth skill …
— Elliott Kember, Unfinished Business, Episode 57 — 46:00
What if … what they’re actually teaching these kids is not the code itself. Not the HTML, Javascript, and Python but the actual mentality that you sit down and code at the computer — the methodology of the physical act of doing it. If that’s the case, then programming isn’t the right word to use … I don’t even think software development is the right word to use. The actual process of sitting down and using the computer to build something; we don’t have a word for that, that accurately fits all web design, design, and programming … we don’t have a word that’s right … Call it whatever you want. The message gets across that these kids are going to use the computer to create things.
– Elliott Kember, Unfinished Business, Episode 57 — 47:38
Andrew and Elliott’s attempt to define code and programming makes me think of my personal struggle to define the work I do. I play several roles and the definitions of these roles are constantly changing. Kember suggests a new word for describing the process of sitting down and using the computer to build things. This is the act that unifies designer, engineer, project manager, technical officer, accountant, content strategist, and everyone else. The fact that we all build things with keyboards, mice, screens, and software is unifying.
Designing interactive products is not like being a butcher, baker, and candle stick maker. What should we call people who use a computer to build digital products?