I love this idea from Uday Gajendar at Ghost in the Pixel, which is rapidly turning into one of my favourite design blogs.

Yes, it’s great fun being a firestarter. Not every culture may respond positively to this kind of approach but as I’ve said on this blog several times, taking the position of “informed visionary” can only empower yourself as a designer, thus improving the product and customer experience…and thus the business overall. Sometimes you just gotta provoke and light that fire, before being suffocated by the tunnel-vision induced mediocrity or bureaucratic processes. It’s good to provoke discussion, debate, conversation, to get ideas flowing and people talking about ways to make things better. Sometimes you just gotta ask forgiveness, not permission, and do the right thing.

I think the position of informed visionary is quite natural for a designer, whether or not it’s consciously taken. But it takes confidence to be a firestarter, especially if a company’s culture runs counter to it.

Thanks for the inspiration, Uday.

I happened upon this interview with Hugh Dubberly, by Steven Heller. A link to download the whole PDF is below, and I’ve quoted two bits I think are particularly relevant to designers.

Design has moved from a focus on form and meaning to a focus on action and interaction. Increasingly, designers are faced with the need to design integrated systems. Systems of systems. Connected sets of products and services. These systems form ecologies that grow and evolve. Their outcome cannot be pre-determined. Even the full range of use may be difficult to predict.

Dubberly describes his ideal design curriculum for changing design practice below. Sounds like the ideal 21st-century designer is a creative polymath:

What skills should the new media and digital designer learn to
be literate in this field?

The main thing for designers is to be curious—and to learn how to
learn. My ideal curriculum might look something like this.

Design Theory:
- Design Methods
- Research Methods
- Information Structures and Key Models
- Principles of Interaction
- Philosophy and Ethics of Design

Visual Studies:
- Principles of Visual Perception
- Rapid Visualization Drawing
- Typography (editorial and display)
- Content Management Systems (grid systems)
- Way-finding Systems
- Information Design (visualizing information structures)
- Motion Graphics
- Sound Applied to Motion Graphics
- Film Making

Design Practice:
- Information Spaces
- Tools and Applications
- Games and Collaborative Authoring Environments
- Interactive Spaces
- Controls and Haptic Interfaces (physical interfaces)
- Integrated Systems of Products and Services
- Tools for Making Tools
- Systems that Evolve

History:
- of Art
- of Architecture
- of Graphic Design and Product Design
- of the Design Methods Movement
- of Science and Science Fiction
- of Information, Computing, and Interaction

Computer Science:
- Procedural Programming
- Data Structures
- Object-oriented Programming
- Web and Network Applications
- Building Sensors, Displays, and Actuators
- Modeling with Fractals, Genetic Algorithms,
and Cellular Automata

Communications:
- Writing
- Public Speaking
- Rhetoric
- Semiotics
- Epistemology
- Cybernetics (science of feedback)

Related Disciplines:
- Biology (natural systems)
- Cognitive Psychology (learning systems)
- Sociology (social systems)
- Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography
- Marketing
- Economics
- Organizational Management

Download it here. The rest of the interview is very interesting and I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Mark Boulton tweets what I’ve felt all along about Comic Sans:

I think, from this day on, I’m on a mission to defend Comic Sans. It’s really not a bad typeface at all.

Following up with:

Comic Sans is not at fault here. It’s not a bad typeface. It’s the victim of ordinary people making uniformed design decisions.

Yes! Comic Sans is a victim; and the culprits, ordinary people.

Most typefaces can lend themselves to most contexts; the best are praised for their transparency. But Comic Sans is not a transparent type. The lightheartedness of the font is so clear in its design it’s an offense to see it used in inappropriate contexts.

The ubiquity of Comic Sans in print ephemera, and to a lesser extent, websites, suggests it has some things going for it. Or that, as Mark Boulton suggests, there should be better tools for choosing type – something superior to a dropdown menu.

Perhaps the cause would be helped by a basic typography education movement?

More about Comic Sans’ history here.

Here are some ideas I found especially interesting in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design in the first chapter, which gives insights into the birth of modern design in around 1900. This period of 1880–1930 was a fascinating and turbulent time for the arts (the influence of Modernism).

The first visual symptom is the departure of ornament, and the recognition that machinery can be beautiful without ornament:

All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.

It’s surprising that the above quotation is attributed to Oscar Wilde, also known for writing particularly florid poetry. His argument is that ornamentation isn’t necessary for beauty, as “the line of the strength” (its functionality as a machine) and “the line of the beauty” (its aesthetic) are one.

Machinery can be beautiful without ornament: it is beautiful because it works well. In the same chapter, Pevsner quotes Van de Velde, who asks if the engineer should be on equal footing as the architect:

Why should artists who build palaces in stone rank any higher than artists who build in metal?

Engineers are architects, then, who use a different medium/materials. (On the flip-side: why can’t the product of an architect, a building, be a piece of machinery? A house a machine for living in…)

Van de Velde raises engineers to the level of architects: engineers are “the architects of the present day”. He requests “a logical structure of products, uncompromising logic in the use of materials, proud and frank exhibition of working processes”. This is sounding like highly relevant (and inspirational) advice for web designers and developers. Designers especially: we do like our working processes, our user testing, and a synthesis of other disciplines such as psychology in our craft, after all.

Adolf Loos, like Van de Velde, calls our engineers “our Hellenes” (meaning the Greeks: the culture which inspired the Roman Empire). So from the engineers, “we receive our culture”. Culture – previously the exclusive realm of poets and painters – received from engineers and technologists. Nikolaus Pevsner points out that Loos consistent enough to call the plumber “the quartermaster of culture, i.e., the kind of culture which is decisive today”.

Of course, there are different circles of culture. If we believe Doris Lessing, computer scientists, web developers, and web designers would be those complicit in propagating the “inanities” of the internet. One of the best things about the internet is that it’s an open platform for people to make of it what they will, high and low. Typophile and LOLcats (and people who like both).

Finally, a timeless design principle from Otto Wagner in 1894:

All modern forms must be in harmony with [...] the new requirements of our time.