It’s All in the Technique

Charles and Ray Eames are pretty awesome in that they were working with so many different materials and made so many different chairs with different combinations of features. When people would use their products they learn each time what made those chairs successful or not then applied that data to their ultimate design, the Eames Lounge chair. This is an extremely common technique used by designers today. Make a product and learn from it. Charles and Ray were keen enough to be consistant in the quality of their chairs which allowed for them to create the Lounger. Ladislav Sutner considered how a person would look for information. He took convential aspects of human nature like reading traffic signs and applied that to his work to control the flow of information for the reader. He realized using symbols and graphics is a good way to direct someones attention. Karl Gerstner pretty much set the standards for web design. The constraints that come with using his system of grids for design created a standard recipe for structuring a page. The grid is flexible to accomodate the information being placed in differently sized canvases. Now that we’ve been designing with grids for so long a few aspects of page-layout are standard.

Henry Dreyfuss said, “It’s better to be right than original” and that is something I am told almost every week as an interaction designer. We know so much about people and we have so much data to work with that we know now success doesn’t only come to the person who did something first, it goes to the person who did it right. Oftentimes Apple follows this model of thinking. When they made the first iPhone it couldn’t handle a copy/paste feature and didn’t even have Bluetooth. Although other phones at the time had these capabilities they didn’t want to include features they didn’t believe were “perfect” in order to avoid even more friction due to a bad feature/ design. Henry also believed that our designs could affect the lives of millions of people. With that in mind, I think as designers we found it’s our responsibility to design with “people” as the core design constraint. We need to understand how people use their senses to interact with the world and we study ourselves and our communities continuously. We are doing research to attempt to understand the possible ramifications of our designs as well. We can invent a totally cool wireless, nuclear reactor that’s built-in our toasters but without the research, our design could harm millions of people.