Brad Lauster .com

I recently posed a question to one of my design email lists: How does one learn design?

The answers I got back were less than satisfying. Most people responded with reading suggestions. I think they were answering a different question: How does one teach design?

Anyway, when I think about how I learned design, I can't help but remember how hard it was for me. I think the difficulty had something to do with being stuck in the mindset of my profession at the time (I was a programmer at Intel).

While thinking of this, I kept coming back to the notion that perhaps this all comes back to language? I'm personally unsure if there's any difference between one's "way of thinking" and the language they use to describe their thoughts.

Certainly one of biggest hurdles, for me, was learning how to express the relationships and interactions between people and software. In fact, I recall having a discussion about the problem with a brilliantly eloquent friend of mine, Jon Littell. I was discouraged because I had all these things I wanted to say but I didn't have the words to describe them. Argh, that was so frustrating!

It seems that by writing this, I'm now clearer about the separation between my thoughts and my language because until I had thoughts about design, I didn't have a need to describe or discuss them with anyone.

I wish I had a better answer than "change the way you think," but it seems that's how I learned design. Unfortunately, this doesn't really help us make design more accessible to the great managers and business leaders of the world.

I really do believe that the way great designers filter life, creating their own experiences, is fundamentally different than the way great managers, for example, filter life.

I suppose if I knew the similarities between designers' and managers' filters, then I would have solved the one of the biggest problems for the design community: getting "business" to recognize the value of design.

Please tell me, how did you learn design?

I went to La Morentia for lunch last week and a woman at the table behind me was conducting a job interview.

You would not believe the bullshit coming out of their mouths!

The thing that surprised me most wasn't the ridiculousness of the conversation, but that it seemed so obvious that the interview questions weren't going to get the woman the information she needed to make a decision about hiring the guy.

"Tell me about a time when you faced conflict at work and how you handled it."

Complete garbage! Every interviewer asks that canned question and every interviewee has an equally canned response.

I wonder if this does not bode well for me the next time I have to interview for a job? If someone starts asking me canned questions, I'm sure I'll have to call them out.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian has a good article: How to put your money to work—against the war.

This dog has a lot of charisma. [Thanks to May for the smoochy poochies link.]

I need a new umbrella, but I can't find one I like. They're all black and boring. This design by Tibor Kalman is fun, but I was really hoping for a white umbrella. Can you help?

Despite what the dictionary says, my experience suggests that contemporary is actually a synonym for "that which has recently gone out of style."

More proof that the sugar industry, as represented by the Sugar Association, is truly evil. In the article, "Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO," Sarah Boseley, health editor of The Guardian reviews some of the Sugar Association's strong-arm tactics to subvert the World Health Organization's healthy eating recommendations.

If I can manage to find the email address of the person responsible for the WHO's response to this bullying, I'll post it. For now, please send your concerns to postmaster@paho.org (PAHO is the Pan American Health Organization, which is the regional WHO office that includes the United States).

A potentially historic moment: at 11:33 pm this evening, I ran Chandler 0.1 for the first time.

This morning I discovered a great mug cleaning tip: putting 3-4 tablespoons of salt in your tea or coffee mug, before scrubbing it with a sponge, will completely remove all the stains that've built up. My tea doesn't taste much different this morning, but it sure feels more clean!

Lately, due in large part to what Karl Long's been writing about, I've been thinking about the connection between brand and experience design.

On Sunday, Karl proposed what I think is a great definition of strategic Experience Design:

Strategic Experience Design is the orchestration of a company's (and partners') behaviors, communications, environments and products to serve a customer across multiple tasks/activities/contexts.

The behaviors, communications, environments and products bit comes from Wally Olins, who proposed that those are the four ways a stakeholder can experience an organization's brand.

So, having seen Hugh Dubberly speak at BayCHI earlier this month, I set to sticking Ollins' four aspects into Dubberly's model and came up with this:

I like Karl's definition because it avoids the oh-so-problematic issue of not being able to design experiences because experiencing is in people. By which, I mean that experiences are shaped by perceptions and vice versa.

I also like that it separates tactical from strategic Experience Design.

Since Karl's post to Paula Thornton's experience design group on Yahoo this Sunday, it's now clear that Experience Design is an appropriate name for the strategic orchestration of a company's behaviors, communications, environments and products.

Tactical Experience Design is no different than User-Centered Design and since we can't actually design experiences, we should only use Experience Design to refer to the work of "strategic orchestration." We should use User-Centered Design to refer to all that other wonderful stuff we do.

I think this is important, so let me be perfectly clear that all the ideas in this post came from Hugh Dubberly, Wally Olins and especially from Karl Long. I just stuck them together.

I hope this is useful. Let me know what you think.

This evening, Selena opened a bottle of 1997 Charles Krug Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. I thought is was the best wine I've had in three years. Selena thought she was going to throw up.