Design

Side View Mirror

Revisiting Toyota’s Mirror Control Mapping

April 17, 2018 Design

This happened to be my first experience driving a Toyota Corolla that gave me my brief moment of ignorance and embarrassment and also reminded me, yet again, of the value of standardization in common design practice. Car manufacturers have strictly adhered to standardization practices such as the placement of the foot controls like the brakes, the clutch, and the accelerator. Then with the two stick knobs – one, with which we control the speed of the windshield wipers, and the other stick control for the directional lights, both residing in a ‘V’ shape behind the steering wheel. Similarly, there are standards which dictate where the driver’s seat should be positioned — left or right, depending upon the country you’re driving the vehicle. These are some of the standard laws & features that exist for any make of a car or country regardless of the geography, though I realized soon enough that the side mirror controls do not seem to figure on that list of standard design practices. The mirrors play a vital role in the manoeuvring of the car. Also depending on the height of the driver, they need to be adjusted to fix the viewing angle of incoming cars in traffic on both sides, and I was left confused in operating this standard procedure on the Toyota Corolla which I will talk about in detail later in this article. Mind you, in some countries, the side-view mirrors are manually controlled from inside the vehicle and I am not referring to those mechanisms in this article, those have a well-defined conceptual model.

Luckily, I was reading the expanded version of Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things or DOET and found my answer through the importance & criticality of standardization in relation to cars. The book mentions that “standardization provides a major breakthrough in usability” in reducing user’s confusion; although machines or tasks could continue to remain complex per se, just as driving a vehicle is, once standardization is integrated within a particular device or machine the user feels justifiably confident in meeting their desired goals. (p. 248; Chapter 6: Design Thinking) Take the example of driving a car, once you familiarize and develop the skills of controlling the vehicle you could pretty much be driving any make or model at anyplace in the world.

A little background about DOET which is an insightful discourse on ‘human psychology’ (previously published as The Psychology of Everyday Things or POET), and a must-read if you’re in the profession of designing interfaces, human-computer interaction, or product consulting. The key emphasis of the book is to promote the importance of developing products that fit the needs and the capabilities of people in creating usable products that align with the psychology of the users to accomplish the purpose for which they are designed. For now, though, I was keen to set out and tackle the task of reducing the confusion from a complex mechanism of the side view mirror controls in this particular make of Toyota Corolla.

Continue reading…

Design Thinking For Organizational Innovation

April 10, 2018 Design

An insightful quote from the Innovation by Design book caught my attention at a local bookstore and luckily I was able to find it on the author’s blog through some rigorous Googling. It gains prominence especially since in my experience, some experts have associated with the design thinking (DT) methodology as a UX design activity referring to its iterative design activities. Hence it was important to make a note of its broader value in innovation here.

The criticality of using DT or ‘human-centred’ design in enterprise software development has been documented in an incisive paper by IBM, but the frameworks also stimulate the transformation journey in combining the organization’s strategic vision involving various inter-organizational initiatives as listed below. Essentially, if you are a practising consultant at the intersection of business design & digital IT in your organization and believe that your role is limited to software consulting, you could expand the scale of your engagements and contribute to the maturity of your institution in more than one ways.

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  • The influence of design thinking at scale on the organization’s culture
  • The creation of new products, services and experiences
  • The design organization processes, systems, and structures
  • The creation and leadership of long-term strategy to distributed innovation
  • The functioning of teams, decision-making and conflict resolution
  • The design of collaborative environments
  • The use of external design thinking experts and consultants
  • The training and development of employees in design thinking

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via How to multiply creativity | Lockwood Resource

The 3 Types of Designers According to John Maeda

March 18, 2018 Design

Designers are moving into mainstream business and as a key element of an innovation strategy, I have pondered on the definition of a ‘designer’ moving beyond their traditional roles of delivering aesthetics and prototypes, though that’s just one way of approaching design. Just recently, I discovered a unique categorization on Time by the renowned designer and technologist John Maeda. It was interesting to gain insights into the groups which he calls Classical, Commercial, and Computational, each coming with a unique set of skills and perspective.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“classical” designers, who create physical objects or products for a specific group of people (think architects as well as industrial, furniture and graphic designers); “commercial” designers who innovate by seeking deep insights into how customers interact with products and services (think teams of researchers huddled around whiteboards and mosaics of brightly colored Post-it notes); and “computational” designers, who use programming skills and data to satisfy millions or even billions of users instantaneously (think tech firms like Amazon and Facebook).

Classically trained designers are apt to look askance at the artistic abilities of designers from the other groups. Commercial designers question how computational designers can empathize with millions of people they’ve never met. Computational designers complain that the methods of the other two groups can’t be scaled.[/perfectpullquote]

Though every organization has a tailored in-house design plan (or not) to meet its tactical objectives, from a strategic viewpoint, it’s prudent to delineate the role of a ‘designer’ that’s based on a certain competency framework which would enable managers to structure innovation opportunities by optimizing the proficiency of the team to effectively meet the targets and to also build the competencies relevant to a project’s long-term vision.

Design Thinking

5 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks

March 8, 2018 Design

During a recent consulting engagement, I was asked by an inquisitive team member on what “value” would a design thinking methodology (abbreviated to ‘DT’) deliver to a business, and also, which “DT process” from a long list would be more suitable for a software development project. The value that is delivered from a collaborative design effort is well documented and could be easily articulated, however, in the case of design processes there are several DT frameworks for reference which would leave anyone to grope for answers, and this encouraged me to compile some knowledgeable DT frameworks into an article. On the onset, the objective behind compiling these frameworks into a single post wasn’t about verifying the efficacy of the frameworks, it was about grasping the ethos behind the design process and to comprehend how various forms of co-creation exercises are conducted. This isn’t an exhaustive list of DT frameworks but just some of the more well-known ones that I have come across regularly during my research.

To ‘Design’ Is ‘Design Thinking’

Industry analysts have widely supported the adage “Good design is good business” meaning that design must be at the core of an organization’s innovation strategy, and indeed, there are myriad design frameworks which outline a collaborative thinking process towards arriving at that objective. Also, just as the numerous frameworks there is a corresponding list of definitions for design thinking, such as, Idea Couture’s Global CEO and co-founder Idris Mootee who terms ‘design thinking’ as a “new management wonder drug” which companies look upon hopefully to save them from the uncertainties and failures of traditional management styles. My personal favourite remains a quote from IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, which is all-inclusive and repeatedly mentioned during presentations and workshops:

Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.

Many in the industry have relegated ‘design thinking’ to merely a jargon or a figment of business school terminology, though it would be quite naive on their part to ignore the peaking interest amongst a global audience in the subject over the last 5 years.

With its varied forms and definitions, it’s not surprising that Design has remained an enigma for many. At its very least, a design could be construed as a process associated with ‘aestheticism’ but in terms of strategic thinking, it could bring together vast amounts of resources — finance, manpower, ideas, or even tech sources, to achieve an optimum target. Particularly since it almost never aspires to follow a linear set of actions and tools design remains focussed on finding answers to ‘How’ something could be accomplished not ‘What’ is to be accomplished, this basic presumption immediately broadens the horizon and enables to capture divergent opinions for an outcome.

Finally, this selection of design thinking frameworks reflects upon the underlying ideology of its respective organization, those which are striving to achieve a common vision for their customers. Their benefits as a model for co-creation exercise is therefore undisputed.

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Happy Birthday, Steve Jobs!

February 24, 2018 Quotes

Steve Jobs

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Steve Jobs