The best design comes from the best questions
As we approach Interaction20 in Milan, we profile design leader and IxDA founder, Dave Malouf, who also co-chaired the first Interaction Week in 2008. His love for coaching and teaching led him to integrate the IxDA Education Summit and the Student Design Charette into the annual conference program
Devoted to the practice both locally and internationally, he served on the IxDA Board of Directors, founded the IxDA New York City chapter, and has been involved with Interaction Latin America.
Learn more about Dave’s practice on his website and follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Thanks for taking time to catch up with us. What are you up to these days?
I am currently the Senior Director of Strategy and Operation at Northwestern Mutual, where I am building a design operations practice and helping their Vice President of Design transform Northwestern Mutual into a design-infused, digital-forward business. On the side, I also do career coaching and curate conferences related to design operations and design leadership.
The latter part of my career has been about helping make infrastructural systems better. If cloud computing is better, so is the retail logistics system that runs on it as well as the eCommerce site that needs those logistics. When the people who serve others have better lives, we all get better from that.
What far-reaching impact can the betterment of infrastructural systems make?
We used to say at Rackspace that Rackspace makes Christmas happen. For so many that is true.
In general though, interaction design can be applied to anything. From making crosswalk traffic flow more easily across a Shanghai intersection, to finding new ways for people to get from A to B without ever having to own their own transportation.
What are the expected benefits and consequences?
They are the same. What is good for someone may be damaging for someone else, or for the planet.
What do they say? Energy and matter are constant, right? So we need to be vigilant as designers that the things that we take to make aren’t coming from someplace, or going to someplace, that will impact others.
Who do you admire and why?
Too many people and I know I’ll forget more than I’ll remember. After 25 years of doing, living, identifying with, communing with design and designers, my admiration flows in so many directions.
I’ll say this. We owe everything to a man and his mouse — Douglas Englbart. No one before him put story to architecture quite the same way.
Tell us about the role of mentors in your career.
I have many mentors. Most are unofficial and probably don’t even know I think of them that way. But I would say that my relationship with Harry Max has been the one that has amplified my professional growth and well being more than most.
A mentor isn’t just someone who helps you, but someone who sees you in ways you can’t, until they let you see you the way they do.
That is what Harry has been and remains to me. He is that person who is on my shoulder always saying to me, “Yup, you’ve got this. This is who you were meant to be.”
What’s your design philosophy and how does it manifest in your work?
I’m not sure I have a design philosophy, except that the best designs come from the best questions. The best questions come from the best observations. Being in the right place to observe the right things, comes from serendipity — and serendipity can be designed.
What advice would you give to designers coming into the field?
You are your most important instrument. Tune yourself, stretch yourself, treat yourself the best you can.
You are the most precious instrument, device, tool in the world and unless you keep yourself in top condition, your designs and your ability to do design won’t be the best it can be.
Travel, explore, learn new languages, discover new perspectives, and stretch your relationships beyond your comfort zones.
All the software tools, and craft skills and everything else that you think makes you a great designer, is just the easy stuff. Well, not that easy. Maybe the easier stuff.
What are the most important hard and soft skills for interaction designers to have?
Everyone will find their own super powers as designers. The question is how do you apply them. The best designers are ones who discover their strengths and find the ways those strengths meet the needs of the challenges presented to them.
GET INSPIRED
Watch Dave’s favorite talk ever given at an Interaction Week conference.
Read Dave’s two favorite articles that he’s ever written: Foundations of Interaction Design and Interaction Design and ID: You’re already doing it. Don’t you want to know what it’s all about?
Check out the book that got Dave started: Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
