process
On Process
People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow there’s some magic in the process that they’ve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.
In my career I’ve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.
Just-in-time manufacturing
Get embedded in the team. Designers should use sprint planning, grooming, standup, and retro as opportunities to provide design to — and receive feedback from — the rest of the team. Designs can take the form of written or verbal descriptions, not just wireframes and high-fidelity mockups.
Only design what’s needed. Use constant communication between engineering and product partners to understand what your collaborators will need next. Then, plan on delivering only what is needed, and nothing more. Use the agile process — grooming, planning, and retro — to find any shortfalls or excesses.
Avoid creating a backlog of designs. Designs don’t age well. In the time between finishing design and shipping code, it’s likely that you’ll learn something new that changes your understanding. If you’re producing more design than can be implemented, focus more on the quality of each design.
How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths
Design skirmishes
it is apparent that the unfolding of the design process assumed a distinctly episodic structure, which we might characterize as a series of related skirmishes with various aspects of the problem at hand.
As the scope of the problem became more determined and finite for the designer, the episodic character of the process seems to have become less pronounced. During this period a systematic working out of issues and conditions took hold within the framework that had been established. This phenomenon is not at all surprising when we consider the fundamental difference between moments of problem solving when matters are poorly defined and those with clarity and sufficiency of structure.
Within the episodic structure of the process, the problem, as perceived by the designer, tends to fluctuate from being rather nebulous to being more specific and well-defined. Furthermore, moments of "blinding" followed by periods of backtracking take place, where blinding refers to conditions in which obvious connections between various considerations of importance go unrecognized by a designer.
How we can do better
It actually doesn't matter whether you actually have a formal retrospective. It doesn't matter whether you have four or five labels of things on your retro board, or exactly how you do the retro. What does matter is the notion of thinking about what we're doing and how we can do better, and it is the team that's doing the work that does this, that is the central thing.
Holistic and prescriptive technologies
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.
The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".
That which requires caring
Today's real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies.
The temptation to design more or less everything according to prescriptive and broken-up technologies is so strong that it is even applied to those tasks that should be conducted in a holistic way. Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planed, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.
Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgment in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.
Direct management
Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
A DefinitionWe are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Deadlines are bullshit
An ArticleIn software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.
- External vs. internal deadlines
- Why are internal deadlines evil?
- Engineers who love their work
The Design Diagram
An Idea by Charles Eames & Ray EamesThis Eames drawing, often referred to as the Design Diagram, was created for a 1969 exhibition at the Louvre entitled, What is Design? Charles and Ray mailed it to the exhibition curator to augment their answers to a series of questions she had posed.
In Defence of Intuition
An Essay by Boris MüllerDesign, it seems, is not only becoming more methodical but also more scientific. This is not surprising. Design as a discipline has moved from “product beautification” to being a central part of product development. It has incorporated methodologies from human-computer interaction, sociology, and anthropology as well as advertising and management. And with the rise of design thinking, a wider range of professional disciplines are using creative methods.
I don’t want to criticize design methodologies. But against the backdrop of an overly structured design process, it is important to remind our community that there is one fundamental aspect to design that cannot be formalized in a methodology. And that is intuition.
Why we need to stop over-complicating UX
An Article by Hugo FroesMany have become so focused on the process and methodologies that they’ve forgotten the fundamentals of why we started focusing on the user and what we hope to achieve with that focus.
Beyond Artboards
An Essay by Chuánqí SunThe Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs.
Just-in-time Design
An Article by Matthew StrömThere is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.
The Hot Potato Process
An Article by Dan MallThe big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.
Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
An Article by Nicholas ZakasWe do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.
The art of taking
A Quote"By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible."
— Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
Technical debt as a lack of understanding
An Article by Dave Rupert"If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding of those features, then eventually that program simply does not contain any understanding and all efforts to work on it take longer and longer.” — Ward Cunningham
A Search for Structure
Apologia
A ChapterGrain Shapes and Other Metallurgical Applications of Topology
An EssayStructure, Substructure, and Superstructure
An EssayThe Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts
An EssayMatter versus Materials: A Historical View
An EssayIconography
It is understandable that those students who must work from reproductions of works of art are usually more interested in iconography than in the more subtle questions of technique and quality, but it is regrettable that technical ignorance should so frequently prevent art historians from considering the whole experience of the artist.
Understanding technique
Technique is an essential aspect of any work of art from a trivial trinket to the greatest painting, and some specialized study of it is essential to full appreciation.
Though museum labels and catalogs refer to materials and processes — “bronze,” “fresco,” “parcel gilt,” “tempera,” “lacquer on wood,” and so on — they usually display only superficial attention to the essential details of the artist’s technique.
Bells
Most Japanese bells when hung still have on them one or more rough lines obviously arising in horizontal mold joints. These lines are not removed in fettling the bell, and they seem to be regarded not as defects but rather as a reminder of the reality of the founder’s interaction with his materials. One is reminded of the ceramics that are most treasured in Japan which usually have some unexpected tool marks or irregularity resulting from a kiln mishap.
Nearer to the surface
If in the following I overemphasize the Orient, this is simply because in the Far East the properties of materials are a little nearer to the surface, a little more consciously a part of what the artist is trying to show. The naturalistic aspects of Oriental philosophy encourage a sensitivity to the quality of materials — or is it the inverse, that an early enjoyment of stone, wood, clay, and fiber gave rise to the philosopher’s perception of the soul in all natural things comparable to man himself? Westerners tend to override materials, usually in ignorance, but sometimes proudly as a tour de force.
The drop press
The virtue of thin sheet metal in giving the greatest glitter for a grain of gold was exploited in the earliest days of metallurgy. However, before the days of rolled sheet and drawn wire, most metal objects were made by hammering and were basically three-dimensional in form.
[In contrast] look at the simple drop press — it’s unmodulated blow striking in a single direction symbolizes much of nineteenth-century mechanized production. To make multiple stampings, stacks of very thin metal sheets were superimposed under the hammer, and the final profile with moderately high relief was gradually achieved as finished sheets were removed from the bottom and new ones added at the top.
When the drop press was used to shape large areas of thin sheet metal, the aesthetic qualities of the surface became divorced from the underlying substance, and decoration became independent of the body needed to support it. In any object there is a natural relationship between the surface and the bulk, that is, between its one-, two-, and three-dimensional aspects. The fakery involved in applying gold or silver playing on a solid copper object is quite different from the deception of an ornately stamped piece of thin sheet brass. Compare a magnificent ormolu furniture fitting or even a gilded plaster picture frame with a cheap lamp base embossed in thin sheet brass. In the former, the surface is simply and honestly applied for its optical effect alone; in the latter the fakery is fundamental for it is dimensionally misleading.
Big things and little things
It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.
All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.
What's the difference?
I well remember an occasion in 1962 when in a remote Iranian village I asked a blacksmith famous for his superior penknives to tell me the difference between iron and steel. “What’s the difference?” he replied. “What’s the difference between an oak tree and a willow — they have different natures and one must adapt to them.” He did not accept the suggestion that some material absorbed from the fire’s charcoal might have something to do with it, and he would not have understood a word of any lecture I could have given him on diffusion, crystal structure, and phase transformations; yet he could make a good knife and I could not.
The scale of human experience
It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return.
The edifice from which they came
A list of types of bricks used in the Hagia Sophia may help one to build an interesting brick wall, but it poorly suggests the great edifice from which they came.
The interplay of pattern and texture
Some of the more enjoyable surfaces (for example, the grain of a fine mahogany table top or a Japanese sword) have an interplay between pattern and texture which, though two-dimensional, suggests the unseen internal three-dimensional array.
Resonances
The resonances arising in workmanship are often very subtle. The fact that the material itself guides the tool differently in different processes of working introduces changes in the overall relationship of curvatures. The smooth curves of surfaces approaching the edge of a jade axe that come about from innumerable abrasive particles moving against a slightly yielding and mechanically unconstrained backing would seem incongruous if other surfaces or outlines were present that had come from cleavage or from the geometric motions of a machine. These could be produced easily enough, but the eye would not establish larger resonances among them.
Fine arts and decorative arts
The fine arts are conscious and essentially individual in tradition.
The quantitative and economic aspects of the decorative arts, on the other hand, make them intrinsically repetitive. Because of this, their aesthetic qualities have a very intimate relationship to the technology of materials, and their design is thereby basically affected.
In addition to the qualitative need for repetitive detail in design, the decorative arts have a quantitative requirement, namely the imperative of covering large areas or making large numbers of individual objects.
Replication
Consider also the development of mass-production methods involving the casting of molten metals. Though the finest castings were made individually by the lost-wax process, the majority of casting from the earliest days have been designed expressly to facilitate molding. As with punches and dies, most foundry processes have the characteristic that the careful work of the master designer is involved only once, whereafter replication takes over.
Reproduction
The success of a mechanic’s, or a machine’s, reproduction of a thing depends on his, or its, sensitivity to whatever qualities are important, just as the skill of the designer lies in the proper appreciation of surface qualities in terms of structure and shape variation that come from the intended means of production.
The inner nature of material
The work of an artist in getting the details that he wants is greatly facilitated if he selects a material whose inner nature makes it want to take the desired shape.
The idea grows as they work
As they work, the experience of the material under the artist's fingers subtly interacts with the idea in their mind to give the finished work some quality that was rarely fully anticipated. A few artists seem to have such a feeling for their materials that the prevision needs little modification; most say that the idea grows as they work experimentally.
True artistry
The best of all examples of a satisfactory art form based upon the inner nature of a metal is provided by Japanese swords.
Our perception of beauty seems to involve the interaction of several patterns having origin and significance at many different levels of space, time, matter, and spirit. In the Japanese sword blade there is heterogeneity in both the macrostructure and the microstructure. The manner of forging, the heat treatment, and the final polishing operation are all uniquely Japanese techniques, and all make necessary contributions to the final quality of the blades. The shape along would be simplistic form; the forged texture of the steel without heat treatment would at best faintly echo the beauty of grained wood; the outlines of the quench-hardened zone at the edge would be sharp and uninteresting if it depended only on the control of cooling rate during quenching; and the polish would be uniform glitter if the metal were homogeneous. With true artistry all these are made to interact.
Simple variations of the parts
Symmetry, indeed, has been grossly overemphasized in both art and science: its main value is in giving meaning to its absence, dissymmetry, without which there could be no hierarchy.
The eye is repulsed by complexity if no order is detected, but it can be delighted by repetition, translation, rotation, reflection, magnification, and other simple variations of the parts.