ANDER

So I have this wallet that my so called friends peer pressured me into buying on woot, so we all bought one. A DB Clay wallet - supposed to be cool/expensive (like a $70 wallet) and I gave up my Lodis one for it.  Now I loved my lodis wallet and was completely content with its being and its “wornicity”.  But I gave into my peer pressure and “coolnicity” of thinking the 3 of us would come to work everyday and throw our wallets on the table and say a cool wallet-club greeting.  Nope. I quickly found out that none of them were going to be using these wallets anytime soon. Actually I found that they werent going to use them at all.

When I found this out I was bummed but “eh” I had my lodis to go back to… “Wait, where’s my lodis wallet?” Just then Coldplay’s “Lost” song began to play on the radio and J.J. Abrahms “Lost” begain to play on the television. It was gone. Dissapeared into thin air. I am now stuck with a wallet that I hate that gives my butt an extra lump (like I need an extra lump).

Moral of the story - a: don’t give into peer pressure and b: 1 in the butt is worth 3 in the hands of my so called friends [twss].

P.S. I linked the lost wallet 3 times just in case some rich soul feels bad and wants to buy me it… Again. (or at least $30 of it)

I read a very interesting post on Zeus Jones (Ex Fallon’s) website about their search for a user experience designer extrodinarre and in that search has uncovered some interesting questions and philosophies on what that actually is.  Being referred to as the 00’s version of the “Account Planner” back in the 90’s I too called into question my pursuit of the offerings I currently employ as a User Experience/Information Architect/User Interface Designer myself.  Although in my price range of small to medium site designs have less of a budget for these kinds of services, I am finding myself implementing and marketing these practices more to my clients.

The conversations of such thinkers fall into three general categories:

1. Discussions around research, tools and techniques
2. Discussions around execution and design
3. Discussions around strategy and ideas

While my research and experience is hopefull to grow in all three I feel I have greater aptitude in some areas than others (from the list above it seems for me anyway, this aptitude goes from 3-1, 3 being the most the one I posess the highest aptitude with and 1 being the lowest or least thought of.

Moving forward with this general knowlege Zeus broke these types of planners down even further - and yet even further still.  Below are the 2 graphs of each breakdown:

So which of these approaches are the best to employ?  If this was a “Yes or No” answer I would definitly say Yes AND No to it.  The important thing here is not the choice of one over the other, but the choice of balance and how much of one and the other (and the other) to employ.  One of the comments on the site said it best (in my opinion):

Good design optimizes the emergence of desirable practical and experiential outcomes.

The Holy Grail is to reconcile the Human Factors/Interaction
Designer discipline stream, with the aesthetic/content/experiential
focused discipline stream.

The key is to find project architects who are versed enough about
all those disciplines to be able to orchestrate projects that balance
these streams. Unlike the dotcom era, we now have a far larger number
of talent convergent types.

We are a young industry who is still reinventing wheels, finding out
what is truly unique about our contexts and creations, all of it.

As I grow and learn in this still very adolescent industry (with such a deep and rich history of its fathering schools of thought before it) I will stick to my guns at designing to the most simplistic standard possible.  The core of good design (in my young and humble opinion) is creating something that has the ability to be used in its entirety be it a simple print brochure or a complex b2b social networking site for indian basket weavers (Theres gotta be a site out there like that… somewhere).

Revolutionary on more than one level - a statement from a very much missed personality Christopher Laurie, “design is a good idea”; and thats more than just a loaded pun.