Principles for the Working Product Designer
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This document provides principles for product designers to consider in their work. It discusses the importance of materials, craft, people and business in design. It emphasizes practicing design skills, collaborating with others, understanding user needs and making designs that can be successfully built and sold. The document also notes the importance of constraints, iteration and managing complexity when bringing products to market.
![“[Form] is the combination of feelings
and a function; shapes and things
that come to one in connection with
the discoveries made as one goes
into the wood that pull it all together
and give meaning to form.”
- James Krenov, A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/principles-for-product-designers-141106233419-conversion-gate01/85/Principles-for-the-Working-Product-Designer-19-320.jpg)
Principles for the Working Product Designer
- 1. Principles for the Working Product Designer PDX UX, November 6, 2014 @chrisrivard clearwired@gmail.com
- 2. 1. Materials 2. Craft 3. People 4. Business 5. The Design Problem
- 3. Materials
- 4. Industrial Design Silicon Anodized aluminium Stainless steel Glass
- 6. Musical Composition Rhythm Melody Key Scale Consonance & Dissonance
- 7. Clint Mansell Leaving Earth or First Snow (The Fountain, Black Swan, Moon, ME3) Hans Zimmer Jisas Yu Holem Hand Blong Mi (Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life) Philip Glass Koyannisqatsi, Pruit Igoe & Prophecies (Koyannisqatsi, Watchmen)
- 8. “The author is not inclined to the sanguine belief that such a subtle and imaginative art as that of composition can be acquired by those not possessed of the innate faculty, by simply studying from books.” - Percy Goetschius, Material Used in Musical Composition, 1913
- 9. Writing (prose) Corbett and Conners, Style and Statement Antimetabole (repetition of words) Chiasmus (reversal of structure) Synecdoche (part for the whole) Metonymy (substitution of attribution)
- 10. The Classic Style Elegant Efficient Unadorned Truthful Confident Conversational (single reader vs. group)
- 11. “Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want.” “It is the destiny of mint to be crushed.” - The Food of France, Waverly Root
- 12. Design posture The nonfiction essay Conversational Looks easy
- 13. Fashion and digital design The business of design Language constrains the way we talk about design (design critique).
- 14. “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” - T.S. Eliot
- 15. Passive (cognitive) vs. Interactive (cognitive + physical)
- 16. Software Product Design Pixels Algorithms Compute Behavior & Interactions Business Model
- 17. Software Product Designer (Research, Interaction/Behavior, Business, Engineering, Marketing)
- 18. Craft
- 19. “[Form] is the combination of feelings and a function; shapes and things that come to one in connection with the discoveries made as one goes into the wood that pull it all together and give meaning to form.” - James Krenov, A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook
- 20. Warm up away from a machine
- 21. Designing is defining No instructions
- 22. “Practicing” my running Importance of repetition and volume. Ira Glass: The Gap.
- 23. Be a generalist (but an expert in something, T-shaped)
- 24. “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” - Shunryu Suzuki
- 25. Know your habits Cowboys, Ninjas and Unicorns. Multidimensional.
- 26. Just enough design process Guidelines to fall back on if things go pear-shaped Checklists and runbooks (Atul Gawande) Collaborate: succeed or fail together Quickly get your product to your users (quality/speed balance) Agency vs. In-house
- 28. People
- 29. “It requires a genuine fight to produce one well designed object of relatively permanent value.” - George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree
- 30. “We’re in violent agreement.”
- 31. The buddy system (suiting up)
- 32. Nonverbal behavior (Power poses, physical barriers to collaboration)
- 33. Mentor & Protégé (be both)
- 34. Find a design confidant
- 35. Design management (we need more leaders)
- 36. Design + Engineering ** (conspire to make it real) Product management Marketing Sales
- 37. “Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing”. - Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication
- 38. Business
- 39. "You can start to use a design as a tool to spot where the problems are in a company.” -Irene Au, Khosla Ventures
- 40. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” –Edward Deming
- 41. Sustainable software products (let people pay you)
- 42. Product lifecyle (inception to EOL)
- 43. Scale & complexity (levers and switches)
- 44. Entropy & Incrementalism (big ships turn slowly)
- 45. “Constraints are hard because they represent the bar, and the bar is high on existing, successful products.” - Julie Zhuo, Product Design Director, Facebook
- 51. Thank you for your attention. @chrisrivard clearwired@gmail.com
- 52. References / Resources / Attribution Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Conners (1999). Style and Statement. London. Oxford University Press. Krenov, James (1976). A Cabinet Maker’s Notebook. Fresno, CA. Linden Publishing Nakashima, George (2012). The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections. Tokyo. Kodansha International. Root, Waverly (1992). The Food of France. New York, NY, Vintage Books. Goetschius, Percy (1882). Material Used in Musical Composition. New York, NY. G. Schirmer. Rosenberg, Marshall (2003). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA. PuddleDancer Press. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” http://quoteinvestigator.com/ 2013/03/06/artists-steal/ Icons from The Noun Project: T-shirt: Josh from Toronto, Food: Rodolfo Alvarez, Shelter: Public Domain.
- 53. Set in Raleway The League of Moveable Type https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ @theleagueof