Design
What design can't make, evolution can. Kevin Kelly
Instructional | User Interface | Learning Objects | Graphic | Web | Information Architecture | Visual Thinking | Software | Industrial
I am a designer.
Less is more. Form follows function. The one-size-fits-all approach to training ignores that people learn in fundamentally different ways. Most current training is highly discriminatory. Howard Gardiner
"The most outstanding design is that which is perfectly appropriate to what is trying to be accomplished." "Design is one of the few tools that for every (dollar) you spend, you actually say something about your business." -- Raymond Turner, exec, BAA "The designer's purpose is to stimulate curiosity, amusement and affection."
Achilli Castilgioni Alessi, Art & Poetry Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Beautiful Things & Ugly Things Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy." Erik Adigard
Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. Paola Antonelli
Bruce Sterling lecture on Shaping Things to Come
The Psychology of Everyday Things by Don Normankeys to good design: 1. provide a good conceptual model 2. make things visible 3. good mapping 4. feedback
why designers go astray:
principles for design:
Instructional designInternet Time Group Methods of delivering eLearning Time Capsule of Training and Learning from Big Dog Product
Development Process from Payback Training (now Avaltus) Characteristics of a Complete eLearning System (Hambrecht) Instructional Design and Learning Theory Theory into Practice Database 50 theories relevant to learning and instruction from the University of Denver School of Education: Theoretical Sources | Instructional Design Models Instructional Design in Distance Education (IDDE) database of instructional theories and tactics to support the design of effective distance education Training magazine's April 2000 issue had a wonderful article debunking the effectiveness of traditional instructional systems design (ISD). Why is ISD obsolete?
here's more on the subject... Roger Shank's delightful Top Ten Mistakes in Education The implications of the research literature on learning styles for the design of instructional material, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 1999 International Society for Performance Improvement History of Instructional Design Big Dog and Glossary Yale Web Style Guide
Distributed Learning: Approaches, Technologies and Solutions Lotus Institute (1996)
Fred Nichols (This is why HPT won't work. It's Taylorism in new clothing.) Remember: knowledge work must be configured not prefigured.
It is the day-to-day stuff of leading people, not of managing them or their work, that really affects productivity; it's the hand-holding, the encouraging, the going to bat for people, and the sharing of the hardships, the risk, the recognition, and the rewards that tempts people to contribute and sustains them as they strive for excellence. These leadership behaviors must themselves be configured not prefigured. In other words, conformity at the executive level is as deadly as compliance at the working level.
To sum it up, the era of compliance has ended, and with it has ended the dream of engineering individual human performance. The era of individual contribution has just begun and we don't even have a vocabulary suited to discuss the issue let alone formulate decisions and then carry them out. Roger Schank interview with Cappuccino, Deloitte "Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called "objects") that can be reused in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. Learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions. These are significant differences between learning objects and other instructional media that have existed previously."
So states the online version of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a complete book on learning objects by David Wiley, David Merrill, Wayne Hodgins, and a host of others. Wiley: "Atoms, not Legos." Cisco's Reusable Learning Object Strategy. Objects of Interest, a nice intro Terms like classes or courses don't capture the essence of personalized learning. I'm starting to think in terms of learning experiences. Here, between the section on instructional Design and User Interface Design, is the ideal spot to point out a really practical site, Good Experience. Instructional Systems Design 1. Assess 2. Design 3. Develop 4. Instruct 5. Evaluate Instructional Design grew up building courses. Courses are being supplanted by eLearning experiences. A new discipline is called for, Instructional Infrastructure Design. For most enterprises, you buy this from someone else. You can build your own from components, but often that's about as practical as assembling your own Chevy from bags of gadgets you buy at the auto parts store. User Interface designHuman Computer (HCI) Interface Bibliography Information Design Nathan's Interaction Design Bibliography Information Presentation for Rapid Knowledge Transfer Review of Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum Interface Design and Usability Engineering from Isys Information Architects provides great examples of what to do -- and what not to do -- in interface design. Hans de Graaff's HCI Index, Jakob Nielsen's Recommended UI Books Common Ground, a Pattern Language for HCI -- iffy, incomplete. Don Norman -- human-centered design ...major improvements in interface design are both profitable and moral — profitable because a good interface is cheaper to implement, is more productive, is easier to maintain, has lower training costs, and requires less customer support than a bad interface — moral because it brings smiles to the faces and erases furrows from the brows of users. One can do good and yet do well by rethinking interface design. Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface "The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook" -- William JamesGraphic DesignEdward Tufte Graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. Graphical excellence is that which gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. Avoid chartjunk! Burn USA Today. See also Tufte's reading list. Patterns are a vocabulary for design. Christopher Alexander coined the term "Pattern Language" to emphasize his belief that people had an innate ability for design that paralleled their ability to speak. His book A Timeless Way Of Building defines a 'pattern' as a three part construct.
What is Contextual Design? Explanation Graphics, Nigel Holmes The MasterCharles Eames: the intersection that maintains the designer's enthusiasm.
Charles and Ray achieved their monumental success by approaching each project the same way: Does it interest and intrigue us? Can we make it better? Will we have "serious fun" doing it? They loved their work, which was a combination of art and science, design and architecture, process and product, style and function. "The details are not details," said Charles. "They make the product." A problem-solver who encouraged experimentation among his staff, Charles once said his dream was "to have people working on useless projects. These have the germ of new concepts." from Charles and Ray Eames Posted by Jay Cross at November 9, 2003 04:03 PM | TrackBackComments
ID magazine online. Check out the contest winners. I.D. interview with Edward Tufte. The information design guru offers a few choice words about PowerPoint. Posted by: jay cross at December 15, 2003 10:34 AMfrom Lilia: Quality that emerges in action .:new I know that I'm not going to catch up with all interesting posts from Internet-cafe, but I'm still trying :) John Moore (and long chain of others) point to a quote from Art & fear: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. John adds a connection with the book Changing Conversations in Organisations by Patricia Shaw. This is such a fantastic book I can't do it justice here, but essentially Shaw discusses (moving from a) thought-before-action, design-before-implementation, systematic, instrumental logic of organizing, towards a paradoxical kind of logic in which we see ourselves as participatingin the self-organizing emergence of meaningful activity from within our disorderly open-ended responsiveness to one another Shaw is talking about how we talk to each other, the story is about making pots; they're both about recognising that it is misleading to think we can entirely separate thinking from doing - an insight that may trouble a great many management thinkers.4 Comments:
|