“Design” is now “Product” An Article by Dorian Taylor dorian.substack.com Design has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design. This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario. Steve Jobs designengineeringconstraints
Navigation by shibboleth An Article by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com The inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page. Reverse chronology bias bloggingtime
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin An Article by Dorian Taylor I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded. Tracing the answer backThe UX coral reef ux
Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics An Article by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com In my opinion, what makes a designer competent is precisely their ability to credibly justify their conclusions. If you can’t do this as a designer—no matter how successful your results are—then neither I nor anybody else can tell if you aren’t just picking things at random. What I am proposing, then, is no less than to make a designer’s entire line of reasoning a matter of permanent record. On the surface is the familiar set of prescriptions, components, examples and tutorials, like you would expect out of any such artifact. Attached to every element, though, is a little button that says Why? You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next Why? until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t. The Design of Design decisionsdesignsystemsstyle
On the "Building" of Software and Websites An Essay by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project. You are agreeing to make a ThingThe Thing-deadline calculusTrees and graphsContent as value The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the EarthHofstadter's Law softwarebuildingwwwconstruction
Agile as Trauma An Essay by Dorian Taylor doriantaylor.com The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. Many a corner officeIntramural brownie pointsFeature factories agilemanagement
What's Wrong With This Model? A Chapter from The Design of Design by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. What's wrong with the rational modelDeciding what to designEvaluating goodnessChanging constraintsThey just don't work that way+1 More
What's wrong with the rational model We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing The Constraints Keep Changing Changing constraintsDeciding what to designThe situation talks back
Deciding what to design We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design. I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted. Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process. What's wrong with the rational model iteration
Evaluating goodness The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally The Rational Model assumes that design involves a search of the decision tree, and that at every node, one can evaluate the goodness function of several downward branches. In fact, one cannot in general do this without exploring all the downward branches to all their leaves, which is possible in principle, but leads to a combinatorial explosion of alternatives in practice. What's wrong with the rational model
Changing constraints The Constraints Keep Changing The explicit listing of known constraints in the design program helps here. The designer can periodically scan the list, asking, “Can this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?” What's wrong with the rational model constraints
They just don't work that way Perhaps the most devastating critique of the Rational Model, although perhaps the hardest to prove, is that most experienced designers just don’t work that way. “Conventional wisdom about problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behavior of expert designers. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and prescriptions for design behavior.” — Nigel Cross
We must outgrow it Why all this fuss about the process model? Does the model we and others use to think about our design process really affect our designing itself? I believe it does. I believe our inadequate model and following it slavishly lead to fat, cumbersome, over-features products and also to schedule, budget, and performance disasters. The Rational Model, in any of its forms, leads us to demand up-front statements of design requirements. It leads us to believe that such can be formulated. It leads us to make contracts with one another on the basis of enshrined ignorance. A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, obviating many arguments with clients and much rework. The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.