blog

There’s nothing like the smile that a sunny morning ride across the fabled Brooklyn Bridge can paint on your face, or pulling off the West Side Bike Path at 14th Street to discover that you’ve led an impromptu bicycle calvacade halfway up Manhattan. Against all odds, I’m a sometime bike commuter in New York. Since life in this city is so unpredictable, bike parking — especially in-building bike-parking — is what makes it all possible. I’m lucky to work in at a company with an indoor bike room; if I end up meeting friends across town, or leave work as the spring sleet begins to fall, I can always beg off until the next day, knowing that my bike is safe inside.

Not everyone’s so lucky, though. “A study conducted by the Department of City Planning found that lack of access to secure bike parking was the primary reason cyclists did not ride to work. The current standard fixture for bicycle parking consists of variations of a fabricated square steel tube called the “CityRack” that is mounted on sidewalks. These fixtures occupy little space on the sidewalk and do not obstruct the flow of people or goods…. The CityRack design, however…. does not fulfill the potential to be an icon for New York City cycling.” — CityRacks Design Competition website.

The Big Apple is looking for some new sidewalk dressing that’s elegant, innovative, durable, and iconic, and it’s doing so via an international design competition with four disparate but significant sponsors: the NYC Department of Transportation, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, Google, and advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.

Unlike many design competitions, there’s a user testing cycle built in! Up to 10 teams will receive up to $5,000 to fabricate their solution, which will be installed and tested at 2 public locations throughout NYC. Final winners are selected after that period. It sounds like the challenge is to improve on a generally useful and usable status quo, while adding an element of desirability to the new design.

Register your team by April 30, and submit your design by June 9 at http://nycityracks.wordpress.com/

Responding in part to our post, Restless Mind argues that Apple’s process is nothing special. Their secret sauce is fear. This is a point worth considering, but though he claims that process and talent pool didn’t change pre- and post-Jobs’ return, in Bill Moggridge’s interview with former Apple UI head Cordell Ratzlaff in Designing Interactions, Ratzlaff describes a radical change when Jobs arrived from a business and engineering controlled design process to a Jobs-designer process. (See video of part of interview) To Restless Mind’s point, Jobs was the key to making this happen, but it was process change that was being effected.

I think there may be something to Restless Mind’s theory. But I have designed in cultures where design is also ruled by fear, but the results are very different than Apple’s. But previous to reading Apple’s notes on design from the inside, some of the ideas the Apple manager describes had occurred to me as interventions for processes I was involved in. For example, say there’s a manager that some designers approach with fear, and designers are asked to present a single mock to management as a way of cementing designer authority as curators of ideas in the organization. I’ve seen fearful designers repeatedly choose the approach they think will be more acceptable and familiar to the manager, rather than a radically different approach they thing might get them seared. Having tight deadlines exacerbated this further since designers didn’t have access to the gatekeeper manager for multiple cycles — they needed to really nail it with one or two review cycles. It is this context where I longed for a tweak to the process so we could show multiple approaches, showing managers the unexpected without getting lambasted or extending the number of review cycles.

What about the hi-fi mocks that fly in the face of much I was taught in design school? I’ve definitely met with lo-fi illiteracy with design clients before, and have had to train them to learn to imagine with lo-fi, sometimes starting with hi-fi and scaling fidelity back graduatlly. But when presenting to people I alone can’t train, say executives in a large company, prudent use of hi-fi has its place. Going quickly to hi-fi can also help when the choice of concept direction actually hinges on whether we can pull things off visually.

Do design methods determine the product? No. Anyone who has designed in the rough-and-tumble out of school knows that method doesn’t determine what you actually do on the ground — it just serves as a resource and guide. As Lucy Suchman wrote, plans only weakly determine action — action that has to deal with all the local contingencies the method didn’t predict*. That said, methods can help communicate, coordinate, and keep us from having make everything up every time.

So Restless Mind’s point about fear bears thoughtful consideration, but the interest in peeking into Apple’s design process is more than the cult-like Apple worship that can sometimes overtake designers. The interest, for this blogger, came in the context of previous process experiences, both with and without fear.

Interested in more insight to Apple’s design process? “The Good, Bad, and the Ugly: Secrecy’s Place in Design” includes interviews with Ratzlaff and early Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld. You can buy the issue in our online store.

*Suchman was writing about navigators and copy machine users, but it’s true of design method too! [source]

Via Learnlets, we hear that Business Week reports on Apple Engineering Manager Michael Lopp’s SxSW presentation on Apple’s design process It’s brief, it breaks some conventional wisdom with design process ideas about fidelity, and it totally meshes with what I’ve heard from friends who work there before they silence themselves.

Pixel perfect mocks and the practice of presenting 10 different good mocks for any possible feature to management especially fly in the face of widely taught design practice. Generating low fi to avoid detailed critique does takes a certain low-fi literacy from audiences I’ve designed for — a literacy that isn’t always there — and sometimes does end up with surprises as things end up needing reconfiguration when visual design is seriously considered down the line. And though I was also taught the designer should advocate for one design they feel ls best when in front of the client, when the client starts nitpicking the design to deal with the ways in which the design doesn’t sit well with them, I have wished I could just show radically different options to give them a sense of the space they won’t be able to enumerate with their verbal suggestions.