functional is design. beauty may not be.

Over the weekend I spotted an article in The New York Times being grumpily passed around Twitter. Reading quotes like the following made me grumpy, too:

When Peek, a start-up for booking travel activities, designed its first iPhone app, its co-founder and chief executive, Ruzwana Bashir, said she prioritized design over other factors. The app shows large photos instead of a list of activities, for instance, even though it meant Peek could not fit as many activities on each screen.

Designing Peek to have less activities per screen because it looks better is not design. Designing Peek to have less activities per screen because showing large photos makes it easier for users to navigate the app is design.

Unfortunately, this article was another story making a false distinction between how something works and how something looks. It refers to the former as 'function' and the later as 'design,' but really the design is how the two interact.

This is not to say all the examples in the article failed to be design. After all, in other cases the aesthetic improvements also increased usability. Despite the constant confusing of aesthetics as design, the concluding sentence gives hope: "first and foremost I look for empathy, because design is not art, it’s actually solving real problems for people."

Design can be functional. Design can be aesthetics. But design can never ever be aesthetics over function.

hacking at social change

[Graphic design by Hannes Beer]

Lately I've been thinking a lot about design thinking and user-centered (and human-centered) design. In particular, I've been thinking about how it can be used across fields, not just by designers. Two nights ago, the phrase "Design Thinking for Hackers" came into my head and I couldn't quite shake it.

I know next-to-nothing about hacking. Living in the Bay Area, I'm fairly familiar with the concept and its lean, quick-and-dirty, just-see-what-works model is all the rage here. But I don't code and have worked very hard to keep my design work the physical world. It turns out I'm not the only one thinking about design thinking can help those hackers who busily spend their free weekends trying to save nonprofits and open governments. According to Jake Porway's recent piece in the Harvard Business Review blog:

"For all of these upsides, however, hackathons are not ideal for solving big problems like reducing poverty, reforming politics, or improving education and, when they're used to interpret data for social impact, they can be downright dangerous...You need to have a clear problem definition, include people who understand the data not just data analysis, and be deeply sensitive with the data you're analyzing. Any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start with a question, NOT the data."

So how can hackers avoid hacking up our future? Porway doesn't get right out and say it, but, through design thinking. Through, as Porway does highlight, getting people in the room who understand where the data comes from and asking the right questions. To often, the tech world celebrates grinding away in isolation, which works for creating beautiful objects and interfaces but will consistently fail at solving social problems. Social problems can only be solved by those who understand them. Hackers are comfortable iterating and asking, 'does it work?' Let's get them comfortable asking, 'who does it need to work for?' and 'why?' first.