The People, Place and Space newsletter #18
Don Norman's new book, builder brain, design for care and everything that's wrong with design thinking
Hi everyone, this month my reading list has been so long it’s been hard to pick out the best ones. I’ve even slipped in an extra article because the great Don Norman dropped an excerpt from his upcoming book. It seems everyone has decided to put out an article or blog in February - I wonder if there are a lot of New Years resolutions being stuck too?! Enjoy :-)
Almost everything I see is artificial (Book excerpt)
By Donald Norman
Donald Norman has released the opener for his book “Design for a Better World: How to create a meaningful, sustainable, and humanity-centered future”, the excerpt talks about how most things you can see are designed by someone or by some process, and is therefore artificial. The book is expected to be published in early 2023, I can’t wait to get my hands on this!
Don’s thoughts on the artificialness of design are absolutely true - as a species we have created a “layer” of design around the Earth, of things we have designed in or out. That layer also extends out into space - if you think about all the probes and robots we have sent out into space, our acts of designing artificial things are far reaching.
Builder Brain
By Charlie Warzel
Photo by Ralph (Ravi) Kayden on Unsplash
This article was prompted by a twitter debate that started off with Elon Musk worrying about population collapse, and ended up with Vitalik Buterin - co-founder of the crypto technology Ethereum - proposing that synthetic wombs were the answer. That’s quite a leap! It’s a really interesting thought piece about “builders mentality” where innovation and problem solving are pursued without doing the research needed to understand the problem first.
Where this idea runs into trouble, though, is when the Builders are so focused on building that they misunderstand the problem they’re trying to solve. They are so interested in pushing the boundaries of the possible that they make illogical leaps. The worst version of Builder mentality is that their dreams become reality, but instead of maintaining their creations, they simply move onto the next Big Thing, leaving others to deal with the mess they’ve made.
If you work in user centered design, these battles may be familiar to you…
Was design thinking designed not to work?
By Debbie Levitt
Photo credit: David Goodman on Unsplash
Every time I hear the word “Design Thinking” thrown around I cringe, because it’s usually a fancier way for someone to say “Let’s get some post it notes out!”, and that’s generally where the “thinking” part of design thinking ends. Design thinking isn’t just post it notes and sharpies, and Debbie really neatly explains why.
What it means to design a space for care
By Alexandra Lang, for Bloomberg City Lab
Photo credit: Marianne Purdie/Moment RF
All too often we can design for beauty and miss that we also need to design for care - the maintenance or needs of the space and the people in it. We don’t think about who is taking care of what we design in the long term, or the changing needs of users as they get older.
Designing for long-term care of people and cities has to involve rethinking design practices and processes from within, alongside less hierarchical interactions with users and maintainers.
Also check out Sharon Matterns related essay on Places Journal mentioned in the essay if you get time. These articles both nicely link to the theme of “maintenance” like the one on Builder Brain above. A lot of design is maintenance, rather than “green field” new design work, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
Also worth your time
Californias beautiful design system has been big news, and I can see why. Includes principles, components, styles and content guides.
A UX Designer walks into a Tesla Bar - spot on perceptions around automotive design, a place we can’t “move fast and break things”
This canon of User Experience shows the history and roots of our discipline, it’s not as young as you think…
Make me think! Enjoy the fantastic animations on this interesting angle on design
I’m really enjoying the practitioner stories, and this one about communicating service design has been a great read for me
Some sound advice from Andy Budd on what it takes to do great research in 2022
I always think the best user centered design books are actually those not directly focussed on user centered design, the best ones I have read have been more foundational and indirect, like this one.
A fascinating IA themed read on Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have from Austin Kleon
Dan Brown wrote some great advice about getting better design feedback from asking better questions. He also has a new book out mentioned in the article that is now on my reading list!
What I’ve been up to
Well clearly, reading a lot of stuff! I also had to take a lot out of this newsletter as there was waaaay too much, so I’m saving it for next time. I’ve also been preparing for rather a lot of podcasts and talks after lighting a touch paper with this tweet about being a “Trusted Agitator”. It’s been an interesting month!
That’s all folks, have a great month! 🙌
Laura