Michael Roller

Australia

I’m going to Australia in a week! We’ll be in Brisbane, Bundaberg, Melbourne, and Sydney for about two weeks. Any recommendations of what we should do while there? We have our own plans, of course, but I wanted to ask everyone for more ideas. I’m up for anything – not just art and design but food, drink, sport, culture, anything.

I won’t be posting while I’m there, but I’ll be sure to share my experiences when I get back!

Fine Art

Like many designers, I have a passion for creation. (Actually, I think this applies to all humans, but more on that later.) Besides my work at Kaleidoscope, my hobbies include cooking, blogging, and creating artwork. My design background heavily influences my other creative endeavours. Here’s an excerpt from my artist statement:

My background as a product designer often leads me toward art that feels logical and even manufacturable. I often discover ideas and forms through design projects for structural packaging, consumer electronics, and household products. As I begin painting, I like to set up constraints that generate underlying relationships between multiple pieces.

During November and December, my work will be shown at the Passionate Arts Center in Covington, KY and at Brutopia in Cincinnati. I’ll occasionally post my work on this blog, but if you’re interested please check out my Flickr page.

Tags: art

What kind of learners are designers?

I’ve been wondering why designers can be so challenging of other people’s work. It’s not our intention to offend, but we often need to get our hands onto a sketch, model, or project before it can become acceptable to show a client. This seeming lack of trust can be extremely frustrating. Finn McKenty had the idea that designers might be kinesthetic learners, which requires them to get their hands dirty before fully understanding a concept.

To look more into this, I found a free test online that measures your learning styles. My learning styles didn’t show any extremes, but I am primarily a solitary (15), visual (15), and logical learner (14). This makes sense but I was surprised that kinesthetic learning (12) did not score higher.

I’d like to know if there are commonalities in the learning styles between us designers. Visit Learning Styles Online, take the quick, free test, and let me know what your learning style is!

Question the Brief: First Try

I facilitated a brainstorm with my class using the Question the Brief (Perfect the Directive) ideation technique to learn more about how and when it should be used. I asked them to redefine the tea kettle using this technique. Because it was supposed to be a fun warmup to both the project and the tool, I told them to focus on coming up with the most unusual, entertaining new definition for the tea kettle. Here is where we started:

A portable kettle with a cover, spout, and handle, used for boiling water.

In small groups, they took a variety of approaches. Some had personal experience with tea and redefined the tea kettle based on those. Others attacked each component of the sentence, listing the synonyms and then combining them into funny or interesting combinations. Here is one group’s new defintion:

A modular system of heat and water used to create, move, and dispense comfort.

It took a little time for everyone to get comfortable working this way, but I think it was successful and useful for getting students to think openly about what their tea kettle could be. Rather than thinking openly about portability, it was easy to start to design the tea kettle and decide whether or not it should be portable. In that regard, I think a few guiding questions could be developed to make this tool easier to facilitate.

After my first experience using this tool, I’m starting to understand how and when to best use it. Question the Brief (Perfect the Directive) is a great tool for ideating new concepts when the product or service follows a lot of conventions or has too many expectations. The group must all be on board with using the tool, otherwise it will feel too challenging to the existing work that established the project. When there are infinite other tea kettles that exist in the world, how do you create a new, innovative, meaningful piece of design? Challenging the assumptions of what already exists is a great start.

Tags: design tools

Question The Brief: A Good Tool Needs A New Name

I recently learned about some ideation tools that are great alternatives to brainstorming. Victor Lombardi over at Noise Between Stations gave me some tips on how to use a technique called Question The Brief. Basically, it’s a formalized way to challenge the assumptions of an object or application. I’m going to use it with my students on our next project.

As its main drawback, Question The Brief plays into our already-huge designer egos. We can already be pretty difficult to work with at times, so why would a marketer or engineer want us to be questioning and challenging their work more often? Maybe I’m getting a little executional, but I really like this tool and want to figure out a way to apply it to what I do.

I propose a new name for Question The Brief. The idea of challenging assumptions is important when trying to develop innovative products, but we need to give this tool a name that won’t make marketers cringe. So I’ve used the technique to try and come up with some alternatives.

This was a quick exercise, but I like Perfect the Directive as a title because it has a positive tone of voice and a rhyming convention that makes it memorable. To check, I think it follows all of Marty Neumeier’s naming rules. However, I’m up for other ideas, please let me know what you think!

Tags: design tools

Design Thinking Gets a Skeptic

I’m glad to see Frog’s Tim Leberecht criticize design thinking in his recent blog post. He addresses many of the issues we discuss on a daily basis: isn’t design thinking just basic problem solving? Isn’t design thinking just good thinking? Haven’t we been doing this for years? If you’ve ever used the words “design thinking,” you should read his post and make sure you’re not part of the problem.

My hope for design thinking is that it will help us find a way to further formalize design’s process, skills, and benefits to the business world. Tim’s skepticism helps push this dialogue forward and forces us to think hard about what we designers can really offer to business that complements the work of marketing, R&D, and other functions.

Tags: design thinking

Frog 2008 Design Trends

Frog’s Executive Creative Director Paul Bradley created this slideshow of design trends for 2008. Thanks to the bloggers over at Frog for posting these. I’m not sure how applicable some of the aesthetic trends are for the projects I’m currently working on, but they’re valuable to track all the same. Check it out: