Design

AI-assisted summary

Design is fundamentally a verb - an active practice focused on creating meaningful solutions through iterative experimentation and trade-off decisions. The field encompasses various approaches including service design, human-centered design, and design thinking, all emphasizing the importance of engaging with diverse perspectives and designing with rather than for users.

Key design principles include managing complexity while maintaining usability, creating emotionally resonant products especially in the AI age, and considering sustainable impact through inclusive and ethical practices. Design operates as both sense-making and form-giving, requiring teams to balance cognitive load, embrace rapid iteration, and understand that effective design brings form around function to minimize user effort.

• to design is a verb
• "Splitters" care about UX/Service design/Human-centered design differences vs lumpers don't care as long as you practice properly
• when you start - be shitty, not pretty - throw away easily & iterate further
• leverage Design Thinking
• Uses Design tools to answer the question "What" & Design methods to answer the question "How"
• Kat Holmes in Mismatch: "Design as a practice that contributes to the society in meaningful ways"
• is a rendering of an intent
  • when designing for radical Innovation we need to inform our intuition
  • is about making trade-offs
    • e.g. adding a few clicks (increasing motor load) to reduce cognitive or visual load
• The hardest thing to do as a designer is to bring a lot of complexity but to mask it as much as possible – to make the interface as easy to use while bringing options to advanced users
• The best design does not come from individual designerers, but from design teams
• Storytelling combined Insights and clear business cases are helpful to present compelling narratives
• usually split between Product discovery and delivery
• In the AI age it is more important than ever to create emotionally resonant products that are appealing to people on a deeper level
• As argued in Cradle to Cradle, "being less bad =/= being good" - reducing harm is not the same as creating positive impact
• Sustainable design requires understanding material flows as described by McDonough and Braungart:
  • Biological - materials that can safely return to nature
  • Technical - materials that remain in industrial cycles
• A powerful design question posed in Cradle to Cradle: "What kind of soap does the river want?" - shifting perspective to consider environmental impact from the ecosystem's viewpoint
• Inclusive design, according to Kat Holmes, is fundamentally "about engaging with people that are different than you"
• Three crucial skills for inclusive designers identified in Inclusive Design:
  1. Identify ability biases and mismatched interactions between people and world
  2. Create a diversity of ways to participate in an experience
  3. Design for interdependence and bring complementary skills together
• The key shift is moving from designing for others to designing with them and one way we can do this is through Co-design
• Is a combination of sense making and form giving
• is a continuous process of running experiments, their evaluation and further adjustments
• The role of design is to bring form around the function
  • Form acts as a way to set the context – like the way an axe looks and feels in your hand, you get an immediate sense of its purpose
  • By managing inputs and outputs along structured forms, you minimize the cognitive load required to successfully engage with the product
• Is a problem-solving methodology
• design as a reasoned intention