Velvet Roundup №2
Welcome to the second issue of our little probably-not-weekly article where you’ll find interesting articles, links and ideas, and also little updates about what we’ve been up to. Enjoy.
Inner challenges of a designer
Let’s start of with a good one. Kevin Cannon of frog design outlines nine psychological factors what designers face in their career and how understanding them makes us better at our work. Concepts he has learned over the years. Touches on subjects like how “…detaching our own self-confidence from what we create, it gives us the emotional strength to continue to push onwards”, how difference in junior and senior designers are seeing a new dimension of right & wrong not only bad & good, and about why you need to love the work you do.
“Our taste, our understanding of what is good or bad, is our key asset as designers. The gap between our taste and our own ability is what drives us to improve.” — Kevin Cannon
Read more on The Inner Game of Design
How Helsinki trains its workers with a board game
Helsinki shows us how it’s done. A great story how Hellon, a service design agency in Helsinki. made a board game for the City of Helsinki personnel to “learn about dozens of methods for involving citizens in their work, from public meetings to focus groups to participatory budgeting.”
“Participation cannot be dictated,” Miettinen said. “That’s why a tool like the Participation Game is so useful. It encourages players to find their own way to put participation in practice. The game presents participation as a collective responsibility of a team rather than just a singular action or something that needs to be done to ‘tick the box.’ ”
Read more about the experiment in Bloomberg Cities article “How Helsinki uses a board game to promote public participation”
Designers priorities
Kate Aronowitz, a design partner at Google Ventures argues that now that we have a “seat at the table” we are in danger of losing it if we don’t step up as leaders with deep understanding of the business side of the work and leading a team.
“Over the past few years, I’ve seen a problem emerging. As we shoulder new responsibilities and take bigger design leadership roles, we are falling short. I see us paying too much attention to the “design” part of the role and not enough to “leadership” — defending our own interests without deeper understanding of the businesses and broader contexts we must operate in. I’m concerned that if we don’t step it up on the actual leadership part, we’re in danger of losing the seat at the table.” — Kate Aronowitz
Read more at Co.Design: Designers Finally Have A Seat At The Table. Now What?
Words as tool a for designing
Microcopy gives life and emotion to our interfaces. We need clarity of thought when articulating our design decisions to our clients. Designing with dummy or placeholder text isn’t working out — death to lorem ipsum. Writing is becoming an essential skill to designers and words are a tool for designing.
Melody Quintana from Dropbox gives us tips and tools on how to use words in our work.
“Words are also tools that shape your design. Tinker with them. If you’re designing a button, think about how different verbs affect the tone of the experience. If you’re designing navigation, consider how different labels might influence navigation paths.” — Melody Quintana
Read more: Designers who play with words
“We shape our tools and our tools shape us.”
Let’s watch a great talk from Wilson Miner given at the 2011 Build conference. He beautifully shows us that our opportunity and responsibility as designers is increasing. Reflection at the 17-minute mark sums up the presentation:
“The car shaped our environment in the 20th century in this huge, tectonic way. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the screen will be as important to shaping our environment in the 21st century. What goes on those screens is pretty important. Because the things that we chose to surround ourselves, will shape what we become. We’re not just making pretty interfaces, we’re actually in the process of building an environment where we’ll spend most of our time for the rest of our lives. We’re the designers. We’re the builders. What do we want that environment to feel like What do we want to feel like?” — Wilson Miner
Venn diagrams of designers life
Assistant Professor of Design Mitch Goldstein creates fun little charts that depict the problems faced by designers daily.
Check them out on A Helpful Diagram website.
Honestly About Internships
On Wednesday we hosted Tartu Kunstikool and Pipedrive at our place and had a discussion on internships.
Lets finish the workweek with a thoughtful quote by Offscreen Magazines publisher and editor Kai Brach. By the way, issue 18 of the magazine is available. Go buy it.
“In the wake of global upheaval against the status quo, the tech community is coming to terms with having over-promised and under-delivered. Almost weekly, headlines about security breaches remind us that we’re now in the post-privacy age, where private data is just another commodity. Meanwhile, a cultural shift is bringing deeply entrenched gender and racial inequalities into the open. And in Silicon Valley, unicorn defectors publicly apologise for having created addictive UI patterns and shady algorithms that exacerbate social division. […] In a more enlightened era of tech, we will move beyond a superficial understanding of ‘well designed’, which today seems overly concerned with aestehtics. Instead, good design will focus on creating user experiences that are inclusive and empathetic, on writing code that is open and energy-efficient, and on running a business model that doesn’t rely on infinite growth to survive.” — Kai Brach, Offscreen Magazine, Issue 18
