In class on Friday we watched a video excerpt from Nightline called “The Deep Dive” which featured IDEO, a company that “helps organizations innovate through design.” In an interview with Tom Peters after the episode, David Kelly, Founder and CEO of IDEO, had this to say about design:
If you look at my environments at both school and work, what we do is turning people on to thinking of themselves as creative. At both, it’s the same phenomenon: How many people think they can’t draw? Well, ‘draw is just a word. Substitute ‘innovate or ‘create.’ Some people want to do more of it. Our work is about how to turn people on to valuing innovation, creativity, drawing.
We want to be the patron of the creative leap. We want to make people’s lives richer. Everybody can be a designer. Everyone can learn to draw. People want to be creative—maybe it’s just to make a new flower box outside their house. Why is it that you have it or don’t? Our work is about getting some mileage from design, about doing, trying it” (Reference).
Dr. Gibbons asked us to interview a designer to find out more about the design process. I chose to interview Suzy Gerhart, a senior production designer at the Center for Instructional Design.
I first asked her to describe the design process she goes through in order to come up with a finished design. She said that when she first gets a project, she looks at “the parameters, what things need to be included, what things aren’t included that should be brought forward, and documentation if there is any.” She wants to know what elements she has available to her in this initial phase —”just the guts”—and within what constraints she needs to work.
Her next step is to ask questions of the client and tries to “get a feel from them on how do they want things to come across.” She asked questions about the target audience and other pertinent considerations. With this information as a foundation, Suzy goes to work researching other designs. During this process she asks herself, “What of those things [other designs] can I incorporate into my design.” As the design comes togehter, Suzy said that she probably goes through at least three or more iterations. In her first iteration, she starts placing the design “pieces” to “get them in there and then shuffles them around which leads me to another iteration.” This process is repeated until Suzy gets to the design she wants. “I know that the first idea is probably not the best idea. And this has been drummed into my head since school.”
I asked her to expound on what she thought was some important characteristics of a designer/artist. She replied, “I think that observation is a huge part of it and I definitely believe being an artist is a talent. I think everyone can draw. Yet there are levels within those talents, and as you meaningful explore these talents then your level of understanding [of the talent] is opened to you.”
One of Suzy’s paintings recently was selected as a winner in a contest. I asked her about how she got started on the project. She said that painting for her starts off with a concept or an idea, “Usually I’ll start with a picture in my head. It’s pretty fuzzy and usually fleeting like ‘look at this light passage.’” She then starts taking photographs, creates layouts for composition purposes, puts pieces together in Photoshop, makes a composite and states, “This is what I’m going to paint.”
THE SWORD OF LABAN
Video excerpt of Suzy’s interview
After watching the IDEO presentation and having the interview with Suzy, I feel I have a better understanding of design. I found a quote in a book I picked up at the library on Friday that describes to me what I learned on Friday.
As Dilnot and Buckley have cleary stated, design is more that a practice that professionals engage in; it is a fundamental human activity that is conducted in many varied ways. Design is as much an expression of feeling as an articulation of reason; it is an art as well as a science, a process and a product, an assertion of disorder and a display of order. By learning to look insightfully at the array of designed objects, services and techniques in society we can begin to recognize the manifestations of social values and policies. In design we can see the representation of arguments about how life ought to be lived. Design is the result of choices. Who makes these choices and why? What views of the world underlie them and in what ways do designers expect a worldview to be manifest in their work?”
Vitta, M. (1989). The meaning of design. In V. Margolin (Ed.),
Design Discourse. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.