Michael Roller

Wanderlust: Kaleidoscope’s 2009 Furniture Design Trends

Earlier this year, the Kaleidoscope team attended the ICFF and the Salone in Milan to check out the furniture. Collecting and organizing our observations, we put together this trend document, now on slideshare:

At Kaleidoscope, we think trends are great, but identifying them isn’t enough. We believe that documents like this one are only as useful to the extent that they’re actionable. With that in mind, we supplemented the trends themselves with three guidelines for applying them (slides 40-44): Assess how the trend overlaps with your work, Immerse yourself in the trend, and last but not least, Create something informed by the trend.

We hope you enjoy this document and welcome any feedback!

Tags: design tools, furniture, kaleidoscope, philosophy, presentations, strategic aesthetics, trends

How Designers Think

In a recent post, I wrote about the four essential members of a design team. Each designer is an analytical thinker, a contextual thinker, or (most likely) some combination of both. How do designers use these ways of thinking to create products? This post breaks down the way designers think and the two essential approaches to creating good products.

Analytical thinking focuses on the product, asking key questions like, what are the components of the product or experience? How can we design them to make a better whole? Activities like product teardowns, lifecycle analyses, and in-category audits look at existing products and their components. Contextual thinking, on the other hand, looks around the product, searching for insight through the users, the environment, and everything surrounding the product itself. Contextual thinking aims to answer the question, How can we benefit users and their environment in the design of this product? Ethnographic research leads the charge in uncovering contextual insights, but there are other tools (like Victor Lombardi’s Question The Brief) that can be used to effectively develop ideas far beyond what currently exists.

Of course, product development teams need to use both analytical and contextual thinking to create great products and experiences. They often do so in a differentiated manner, with activities that emphasize one or the other. But how can you ensure that a diverse team with a range of thinkers is engaged on a project?

Integrated thinking combines analytical and contextual thinking for powerful results. Often, teams need to create tools for generating concepts that utilize a broad team’s entire skill set. If a team is a diverse group of analytical and contextual thinkers, the integrated approach helps them collaborate early on in the process. Imagine designers, engineers, researchers, strategists, and project managers working together in an immersion session.

One example of integrated thinking is Forced Association (originally introduced to me by UC’s Dale Murray). Thinking analytically, participants break down and list ideas for each of a product’s attributes, like form, color, materials, manufacturing process, etc. Then switching to a contextual mindset, random mixtures of these attributes force participants to consider the new context that these “recipes” would live in. An activity like this is diverse enough to engage the entire team, giving each team member an opportunity to use their individual strengths. The best teams know how to deploy analytical and contextual thinking individually and when to integrate them, dynamically identifying opportunities to combine their thinking for powerful results.

What experiences have you had that combine the strengths of analytical and contextual thinkers to achieve success?

Tags: design thinking, design tools

Four Rules: Graphic Design For Industrial Designers

Simple bottle concepts require graphics to feel complete.

Helping my students with a consumer packaging product, I explained to them that simple, appropriate bottle designs will look unfinished without some graphic design. The challenge lies in fact that industrial designers can be notoriously bad 2D designers. So working with Finn McKenty, we came up with four principles to help my students be adequate graphic designers when necessary.

1. You know less about graphic design than you probably think.

2. Keep it simple. Less is more.

3. Use a classic font. Start with Helvetica, Futura, Bodoni, Clarendon, Avant Garde, or Optima

4. Ask a graphic designer for a critique of your work.

I recently revisited this list and found it to be as useful as ever, so I thought I’d share it. What other advice would you give industrial designers about graphic design?

Tags: design tools, strategic aesthetics

Glowing Lines, Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials from 2008

Photoshop Lady has a nice rundown of all the popular photoshop tricks from the past year. This is a really good list that covers most of the dramatic, colorful work we’ve seen from people like Chuck Anderson. Lots of them are glowing text, stars, or speed lines, but there are also some surprising ones, like drawing a MacBook Air from scratch.

After doing a few of these tutorials, the pro-tip is to carefully integrate your new found skills with existing work. Start with a concept and then use the skills to support the idea, not the other way around. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a glowing starry night, but it won’t always make sense as a background for your renderings of detergent bottles.

Tags: design tools

Mastery

As a professor in Design Communication, I’m frequently asked about the best ways to improve sketching skills. I always tell my students to read the book Mastery by George Leonard. I go on to explain that the best way to get better is to understand that the path to mastery is not a straight line of consistent improvement. The path is an unpredictable series of plateaus, and the only way to improve is to work regularly and diligently to accelerate the path (see step 2 below).

The Five Keys to Mastery:

1. Surrender to your passion
2. Practice, practice, practice
3. Get a guide
4. Visualize the outcome
5. Play the edge

I’m probably doing a huge injustice to this great book, but i do my best to convince my students to check it out themselves. Having just wrapped up another school quarter, I thought I should revisit it myself and write a post about it. Read more about the five keys to mastery online or get the book. I highly recommend it and I’m glad I was able to revisit these principles through my class.

Tags: books, design tools, philosophy

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