This blog called “Annoying Design” is three years old now, which in internet years is an adult dog. I use this site as sort of a professional diary — a place for thinking, and focusing on what I have to offer the world.
I’ve decided what I have to say is more broad than just user experience or the web. It’s about how the creative process can improve the world around us. Maybe that’s vague, but design is now as applicable to products and software as it is to restructuring communities and saving our environment. There’s lots of uncharted territory here. So I came up with a new mantra: Redesign The World.
With that mantra in mind, it’s time for a a little retrospective of posts from this blog. First, posts from the design category. I hope you enjoy these:
- Design And a Theory of Everything. The most effective design processes are cyclical. User research feeds design prototyping, which feeds user research. And with sustainable design, cradle to cradle creation is all about industry that mimics the cycle of life — a cyclical, universal process. Looking at the basic components of the universe, like vibrations and math, there are clear parallels between the composition of the world around us, and the way over time we as a species re-structure perceptions using design.
- Defining Sustainability As Cradle To Cradle Design. True sustainable design is a product, manufacturing proccess, or business model, that creates minimal waste — whatever it produces for consumption, it takes back and reuses. Some are calling this the next industrial revolution . Rather than the cradle to grave processes that dominated the 20th century, where corporations viewed nature as a limitless resource, cradle to cradle design requires a complete rethinking.
- Three Themed Entertainment Principals. Through course notes I took during grad school at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, I came across this simple list of themed entertainment principals: 1) Know your audience, 2) Know your story, 2) Tell your story using every means possible.
- Choosing what features to design? Hit the sweet spot. A lesson I learned from working on the first Guitar Hero about tuning learning curves. It’s important to think about the different levels of users, and how you will thoughtfully structure a difficulty curve for each of these levels.