VOICES is about listening. It is easy to hear but difficult to acknowledge the voices around us. We can experience the sounds but not always the meanings. This blog hopes to adjust our collective filters, stimulating questions and promoting conversation about ideas both professional and personal.
I Own Design. Me!
Design belongs to me. When LensCrafters advertises a sale on the newest trends in designer eye wear, they are taking from me. Every time Time magazine runs its column about design issues, they are challenging my ownership and usurping my authority. MINE.
The manufacturers of “designer” sheets, towels, toilet brushes, “designer” vitamins, water, condoms, potato peelers, trash cans and DNA are all stealing from me. Ten years ago, devoted members of the American Institute of Architects were architects. Today they’re designers. Not fair. Not fair at all. This has got to stop.
Design is process-driven and that process, much like the proportions of the eleven herbs and spices in the Colonel’s secret recipe, is unique. Creativity, imagination and observation are all elements of a process that contribute to making things work better and smarter, adding joy and enjoyment in hundreds of ways because I thought of it. Connecting the conscious to the unconscious, emotions to motivation as well as appreciation to application are only a few of the ways I add value through enhanced awareness.
What I’m really producing are experiences, better experiences than if I wasn’t designing them. Because I’m doing this, that or something else, presentations become information, planning becomes products and ideas become innovation. I want the credit and the blame for doing what I do. Others might apply their experience and expertise to enrich lives and contribute to understanding but they don’t own my experience and expertise. All this is true because I am a designer.
Tell us how you see design. Joseph and Nancy
Photography / Mark Joseph
Missives
Measured in multiples of 100 units, the picante of chili peppers finds itself at zero Scoville Heat Units for the basic green bell pepper, while the hottest of hot peppers, the Red Savina Habañero chili, ranks in at a whopping 350,000 SHU. We have developed and used a similar exponential process for delivering multiple design products and materials to multiple distribution points for diverse audiences simultaneously. This is the equivalent of having your chill and eating it too.
Noted & Notable
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
By Daniel Pink
Daniel Pink, the working man’s Malcolm Gladwell, has written a new book called DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Like his first book A Whole New Mind, Pink points out connections between the obscure and the obvious. His book pits the latest scientific discoveries about the mind against the outmoded wisdom that claims people can only be motivated by the hope of gain and the fear of loss. Pink packages ideas into applications providing employers and employees with the methods and the means to get more of what they want, the way they want it. Don’t let the cover design scare you off. This is career-changing stuff.
Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior & Character in 5 Days
By Dr. Kevin Leman
In Dr. Kevin Leman’s book Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior & Character in 5 Days, he insists that the only way to correct bad behavior in children is to change your reactions to their behavior. Anyone who has dealt with a strong-willed child knows that it is no easy task to turn bad behavior around. Bestselling author and psychologist Dr. Kevin Leman can help to make a difference. With his signature wit and encouragement, Dr. Leman offers hope and real, practical, doable strategies for regaining control and becoming the parents our children need. Not to say that badly behaved adults are like children but the application of Dr. Leman’s ideas to adult relationships with similar issues is a bonus.
Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy
By Jane Leavy
You don’t need to be a fan of professional baseball to appreciate to a true professional. Jane Leavy’s book Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy has more to do with the man and his choices that any game. Professional sports are all about the numbers. In his last four seasons Sandy Koufax’s numbers were the best ever. With a career half as long as the average pitcher, Koufax set a standard for performance that was twice as successful as any pitcher of his era. However, Koufax the person transcends the player by keeping the game he loved in perspective with who he was.
One example: In 1965, Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in Game One of the World Series because it was Yom Kippur, a Jewish holy day. Koufax’s decision and his pitching brilliance remain a source of pride among devout American Jews, even those who aren’t baseball fans. Unable to sustain that same level of performance for health reasons, Sandy retired one year later at the peak of his career. He became the youngest player ever to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Sandy Koufax defined success on his own terms, using is own standards.
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
By Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim
Much of what goes on in sports can be explained by incentives, fears and a desire for approval. You just have to know where to look. Scorecasting is the sports equivalent of Freakonomics. Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim have written the most important and fascinating sports book in years. Athletes and coaches are encouraged to challenge conventional strategies with calculated risks, producing unconventional results. Just like in life, a little risk is usually a very worthwhile thing.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin
Jeffrey Toobin’s book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, explains for the novice and explores for the devotee the mysteries behind the black robes. It articulates the rise of the conservative movement through the legal world and its acceleration in 2005 with the death of Justice Rehnquist and resignation of Justice O’Connor within a few months of each other. This is a fascinating story about complex and brilliant jurists who are equally spoiled and elevated by the human condition.
All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge
By Kee Malesky
What is plastic soup? How long is a New York minute? What building did Elvis leave last? Who were the Olmecs, and the Eight Immortals? Get the answers to these and many other vexing questions in NPR librarian Kee Malesky’s compendium of fascinating facts on subjects ranging from history to science to the arts. It’s the ideal gift for every inquiring mind that wants to know.
The Art of the Idea: And How it Can Change Your Life.
By John Hunt
John Hunt’s unassuming book is all about how to see, the art of observation and what we gain by taking the time to experience the everyday in new and unexpected ways. This is not a “feel good” book, something left over from the 60s, but a beautifully written and illustrated owner’s manual for our own senses. Instructive? Yes. Inventive and imaginative? For sure. Chapters like Lemmings Have Plans Too and Expediency is Not an Idea are but a few subjects worthy of your time.
A Fine Line: How design strategies are shaping the future of business
By Hartmut Esslinger / founder of Frog Design
After getting past Hartmut Esslinger's (Frog Design) sometimes condescending-sounding manner, he has a great deal to say worth hearing. Filled with process-driven strategies that are almost clairvoyant, reading the book is like hanging on to a bucking bronco. Sony, Apple and Lufthansa did and gained financially and culturally.
Outliers
By Malcolm Gladwell
The latest book from Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink is the best of the three. Outliers focuses on identifying success and failure in all of their forms and conditions. His book is smart, fun and disturbing. Readers will discover that the distance between winners and losers is about 10,000 hours of work plus the luck of circumstances and your birthday. There are several Aha! moments that if applied might change your life.
A Whole New Mind
by Daniel H Pink
Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future is worth your time. Left-brain skills (logical, analytical, sequential), while still necessary, are becoming a commodity, Pink argues, while right-brain talents (artistic, empathic, more about context than content) will be at a premium in the future. Pink writes with charm and humor about subjects that heretofore were rarely, if ever, charming or funny.
1. Joseph Michael Essex June 25, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Alice,
If you see yourself as a designer of coffee cups does that mean you can/should only design coffee cups? No.
REAL (as you expressed it) designers are not limited by the things or categories of things they produce.
Design is a process, a way of thinking about something, while unique to each individual, still follows stages of a process that end with a solutions.
Sometimes the solution is a thing, other times the solution might be an action or an idea.
Like the Scientific Method we learned about in school, by following a series of tasks a solution will present itself.
REAL designers are only limited by themselves not external forces or opinions.
What I intended to write was a humorous rank with a idea attached not to challenge or denigrate anyone.
2. Alice Berry June 25, 2010 at 10:35 am
So you’re saying product designers are not designers?
When I was in school (SAIC), there was a divide between REAL artists, i.e. painters and sculptors, and the rest of us who were studying textiles or photography or printmaking or what was then “generative systems”, which later became the whole way of looking artistically at the digital world, not to mention graphics.
Sounds now as if you are saying there is a hierarchy of designers with
Information designers at the top of the pack, and all the others as - what - fake designers? second class designers?
3. Joseph Michael Essex June 24, 2010 at 1:49 pm
I have a good book for people who wish to commoditize experience and expertise, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
When people of talent, character and responsibility are not paid for their abilities they leave. Only politicians will be left.
4. fiedler June 24, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Sweet! But unfortunately you know today this idea is being “discounted” more and more by folks who do NOT like hierarchy, professionalism, and the idea of a “creator”. Authorship is being disenfranchised day by day. It’s hard to keep the lines from running together in your head.