There's a great column in Wired Magazine (October 2010 print edition) from Clive Thompson about crayons. Ok, it's not really about crayons, but he talks about drawing with crayons. And then he talks about how the fastest way to bring everyone to the same mental model is to draw a picture.
When I was starting my career in design (I guess I still am starting my career in design), I thought that design meant pictures. Drawings. "Art." I thought it was something that industrial designers did to make things pretty. And then I thought, maybe I want that skill. Maybe I'll go to design school. Maybe I'll learn to draw pretty pictures. And now I'm learning that design is more than that. That to be a good "designer" can mean lots of different things.
I recently realized that my creativity has always come in words. I have a lot of respect for lyrical creativity, for beautiful phrases and gutsy syntax. It explains why much of my writing is wordy, why I collect quotes and memorize song lyrics, and why I sometimes deliberately ignore grammar for the sake of style (even though I'm a pretty notorious grammar nazi). I'm still learning how that applies to the realm of good design, and how I can use my lexical creativity to design better products.
This weekend I went to lunch with Howard, our new design engineer. Howard is inherently creative (and British, which is a very important attribute for any design engineer, esp. one that has designed for Dremel). He challenged me, as we were sitting outside of Paolo's eating gelato, to start drawing. Just drawing anything, really. Anything I found beautiful or interesting or useful or inspiring. So here I am, sitting in front of my blank notebook that I bought the same day I started the 750words project. Today, I've got an outline of a wrist (arguably one of the most beautiful, interesting, and underappreciated pieces of anatomy we have), and a diagram of various confluences in the design process (and a feeble attempt to understand my place in the design world).
In Clive Thompson's article, he uses a crayon to draw out various alternatives for a new laptop. Seeing it in pictures helped him understand what he needed and what he didn't, and gave him a means of filtering out the noise. One great design example of this is PadMapper - a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings. Craigslist has the right information, but not in a way that can be broken down and understood easily. Another is the now-famous Ikea method of delivering product assembly instructions. And it's the method of visualization that helps people learn to read, both in the developed world and the developing. It takes a mix of both the lexical talent (appropriate content and use-case understanding) and artistic flair (a usable format and pleasing view) to make a product that just works.
So I can still use song lyrics as a platform for creative brainstorming. But I'll have to start drawing my own emo album covers to go with it.
When I was starting my career in design (I guess I still am starting my career in design), I thought that design meant pictures. Drawings. "Art." I thought it was something that industrial designers did to make things pretty. And then I thought, maybe I want that skill. Maybe I'll go to design school. Maybe I'll learn to draw pretty pictures. And now I'm learning that design is more than that. That to be a good "designer" can mean lots of different things.
I recently realized that my creativity has always come in words. I have a lot of respect for lyrical creativity, for beautiful phrases and gutsy syntax. It explains why much of my writing is wordy, why I collect quotes and memorize song lyrics, and why I sometimes deliberately ignore grammar for the sake of style (even though I'm a pretty notorious grammar nazi). I'm still learning how that applies to the realm of good design, and how I can use my lexical creativity to design better products.
This weekend I went to lunch with Howard, our new design engineer. Howard is inherently creative (and British, which is a very important attribute for any design engineer, esp. one that has designed for Dremel). He challenged me, as we were sitting outside of Paolo's eating gelato, to start drawing. Just drawing anything, really. Anything I found beautiful or interesting or useful or inspiring. So here I am, sitting in front of my blank notebook that I bought the same day I started the 750words project. Today, I've got an outline of a wrist (arguably one of the most beautiful, interesting, and underappreciated pieces of anatomy we have), and a diagram of various confluences in the design process (and a feeble attempt to understand my place in the design world).
In Clive Thompson's article, he uses a crayon to draw out various alternatives for a new laptop. Seeing it in pictures helped him understand what he needed and what he didn't, and gave him a means of filtering out the noise. One great design example of this is PadMapper - a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings. Craigslist has the right information, but not in a way that can be broken down and understood easily. Another is the now-famous Ikea method of delivering product assembly instructions. And it's the method of visualization that helps people learn to read, both in the developed world and the developing. It takes a mix of both the lexical talent (appropriate content and use-case understanding) and artistic flair (a usable format and pleasing view) to make a product that just works.
So I can still use song lyrics as a platform for creative brainstorming. But I'll have to start drawing my own emo album covers to go with it.
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