Posts tagged process
“ When you start it’s inconceivable that it’ll ever be finished, you can’t imagine ever finishing it. And by the time you finish, well, I think those sort of questions of “What would you have done differently” — I don’t think they are necessarily informed by being finished. What you should have done better, probably limitations you have that cannot be particularly overcome by applying thought to them. But they just exist as your own limitations.”
“ I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, the you are in trouble!”
/via Diego Rodriguez of IDEO
Michael Bierut Portrait
The best viewpoint required that I shoot from a twelve foot ladder on Fifth Avenue at rush hour, across the street from Pentagram. I unsuccessfully attempted to get a permission from the city of New York and then just decided to wing it, hoping that any passing police would assume that I must have a permit. To decrease my chances of getting run over by a bus, I persuaded a NYC garbage truck driver to park on Fifth Avenue in just the right spot to protect me and my ladder from traffic.
So much squee for Pentagram
You gotta be careful too, because there are a lot of these research methods, like the rapid prototyping, like the ideation, like the brainstorming methods, like the ethnography, and so on, there is actually no real evidence that it makes a difference.
[snip]
You know what Steve jobs did when he arrived? He fired all of us! And guess what resulted? Better products! Which have revolutionized the way we use machines. And he fired the usability groups as well.
Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010
and thus explains my inability to engage with usability people.
Also, reading The Design of Everyday Things will be good for you
“ Most web design and development projects turn into clusterfucks. The problem is not unique to web-based client services. Advertising projects, graphic design jobs, architecture assignments, filmmaking, and pretty much every other professional creative service usually begins with smart, talented people shaking hands across a table, and ends in finger-pointing and regret—like a Country & Western love song.”
“ Through the influence of the media and technology on our world, our lives are increasingly characterized by speed and constant change. We live in a dynamic, data-driven society that is continually sparking new forms of human interaction and social contexts. Instead of romanticizing the past, we want to adapt our way of working to coincide with these developments, and we want our work to reflect the here and now. We want to embrace the complexity of this landscape, deliver insight into it and show both its beauty and its shortcomings.”
