Designing beyond the visual

Duane HarrisonJamie Sunderland

Hi this is Duane and Jamie. We are final year Product Design students at the Glasgow School of Art. We just wanted to share a few thoughts today about how we design and how it can applied holistically.

Friday, 10 May 2013

There is someone missing today. That’s Reynan on the right hand side. He’s currently doing an internship at i.labs in Tokyo. We have begun to work together to solve bigger problems. Between us we have worked in start-ups, technology companies and research labs.

Friday, 10 May 2013

Are designers sharing?

These are four statements by Anab Jain, director of London based design consultancy Superflux. We very much agree with them, in particular the fourth one. We believe there is an increased importance of the collective wisdom rather than individual knowledge.

Friday, 10 May 2013

This is a nice example of how designers might share currently -Before going on exchange to Japan I followed designers and design researchers. One of them reached out to me first and later that year, I met her and her colleagues. It was a great introduction to many other designer researchers in Japan.

Friday, 10 May 2013

Our connected world allows us to share things of interest and surprise. We set up a simple group Design Share. The mix of students and industry professionals are from different countries and disciplines. It delivers great articles and content which we normally wouldn’t come across.

Friday, 10 May 2013

Design Share Meet up 2013, Cologne

And Design Share was recently taken into the real world with our first meet up in Colonge earlier this year. We went deeper into discussing new ideas about design and the future of designs application across various industries.

Friday, 10 May 2013

We set up a collaborative blog to share different types of creative processes that have been applied to design and research projects. The processes stretch from the simple use of questions to bigger ways to prototype systems. We are excited to publish a selection of these processes in a publication this summer. Get in touch at processindex.wordpress.com

Friday, 10 May 2013

One of the processes is the 80/20 rule. Used as a way to plan and prioritise before diving into tasks; defining the 20% that can give the 80% return can prove of value to shorter time lines and quick tests. This process might be familiar to engineers as it has been mentioned by Microsoft. The focus of task is increasingly tough an information overload culture.

Friday, 10 May 2013

What are we going to learn this week?

Another process we apply is questioning what we can learn this week. By giving a learning outcome of the week it is easier to measure what can often be intangible. This is particularly important for start ups where information and insight from learning is often more valuable than money. Instagram is a prime example of this as they finish in the bar on Friday to test.

Friday, 10 May 2013

So how can we learning more? Seth regularly describes the art of shipping and “getting it out of the door to put in front of someone to criticise”. Getting hung up on aesthetics at the early phase of projects is dangerous. We can only learn through shipping to those people who might use it rather than by creating assumptions ourselves.

Friday, 10 May 2013

Time management has been a focus of our recent project work, collaborating with a software engineer from the University of Glasgow. We questioned how time management could be designed not to feel like management. Sessions lets users pledge target time for a certain activity. With it, one can track time spent on a certain activity over a period of time.

Friday, 10 May 2013

How can we brainstorm better?

We also questioned brainstorming. This image, in my previous experience, is a typical result of brainstorming. It is usually done on paper, and we never usually go back to it. We started to wonder"How can we brainstorm better?"

Friday, 10 May 2013

This is the current outcome of the project. The initial idea was around circular, map-like structure which encourages consideration from all angles. But a great byproduct of this is that it almost forces the creation of more ideas as the space for ideas expands.

Friday, 10 May 2013

Sharing the book

Do people share books?

However, we still believe the physical books are an unbeatable medium to trigger new conversations and develop trust over information. We recently experienced the power of this introducing service design using a book with a contact in a separate industry. From this they could now question a lot more things related to customers and employees experiences.

Friday, 10 May 2013

But is there opportunity to open up peoples bookshelves further to wider localise audiences? The surge of a shared economies proposes a different kind of consumption. Despite this Flickr screenshot and the user annotating their books.. it seems a bit of waste to have these idle local bookshelves that other people could enjoy and create new conversations with.

Friday, 10 May 2013

Twitter is a great example of questioning the conventional ways and applying existing knowledge and behaviours into other contexts. What originated from Jack Dorsey’s fascination with the emergency services short communication as a teenage grew into a global public infrastructure that has opened up the world to other levels of liberation.

Friday, 10 May 2013

When Jack first had insight into the way that the emergency services communicated and shared their location he would never have imagined a service like Twitter. It was his ability to connect the dots looking back and timing in an age where everyone owns a mobile that service like Twitter seems viable.

Friday, 10 May 2013

PROJECT SIZE

PROJECT RANGE

INFRASTRUCTURE SOPHISTICATION

Of course, it is very difficult to discover and answer these questions. So are starting small, with the examples of the app and brainstorming and shared libraries. But we aim for each project to get bigger and hope our learning, capabilities and reach will grow too.

Friday, 10 May 2013

What we can do now is to ask these big questions now and record them. It is of our interest to connect the dots looking back when the timing is right, when societal and technological advancements occur. We hope that in the future, by having developed better capabilities and by working with people smarter than us, we will be able to answer these bigger questions.

Friday, 10 May 2013

designforwards.com

@duaneharrison@jamiesunderland

Friday, 10 May 2013