“To look ahead one must learn to look back.”
– Henry Dreyfuss
Dreyfuss & Human-centered Design
Henry Dreyfuss is known for improving the design of some of the most common objects in a daily scene. Dreyfuss and his teams spent time digging into the user needs & using scenarios in order to come up with designs that are central to its users in every aspect. He set up a criterion for industrial designers: A bad designer fails to reduce friction from the interaction between products and people; A good designer through the contact with the product brings people efficiency, safety, comfortability, or simple joy. This principle can be expanded to interaction designers as well. He made a huge contribution to the disciplines of ergonomics and human factors, helping the industry build-up a vision of the designer’s ultimate mission. Dreyfuss’s early principles of User-centered design serves as the foundation of User-centered Research (UCR).
Gerstner & Responsive Design
Karl Gerstner is a revolutionist. He developed the concept of a flexible identity system for graphic designers where he set up a series of principles that help one design achieve a consistent look across all formats & dimensions. This later became the foundation of responsive web design (RWD).
Sutnar & Information Architecture
Ladislav Sutnar was a pioneer, one of the first thinking how might we present the information in a more efficient way for better understanding & quicker absorbing. He examined factors that would affect usability and findability when users went through certain content. He designed a structural system composed of symbols, hierarchies, and cues to guide users with the visual flow so that they can read quickly and efficiently. This, later on, became the base of Information Architecture (IA).
