Archive for the ‘Design thinking’ Category
Method spent a busy weekend at SXSW Interactive, teaming up with comedian, writer, and founder of Cultivated Wit, Baratunde Thurston, exploring the design innovation process – asking “what’s so funny about innovation?”
Saturday evening, Baratunde joined Method Principal Paul Valerio for a session to explore the parallels between comedy and design.
The session was close to capacity as Baratunde and Paul took the stage for a full Q&A asking what design leaders and innovators can learn from the deliberately counter-intuitive comedy industry. The session exposed how successful innovations, like successful comedy, is both simple yet complex in targeting an audience to make relevant and emotive connections to translate a brand’s value.
Take the session online, we challenged people to tweet questions. ‘Read more’ to check out Paul’s answers to some of your questions below.
Community, Creative culture, Design education, Design thinking
Method discusses Design Education in Monocle’s February Issue
Catch Method in the latest issue of Monocle, discussing our joint venture business accelerator, Method Design Lab (MDL), with Central Saint Martins.
Monocle Design Editor, Hugo MacDonald, visited the Central Saint Martins campus to speak with the MDL team around the accelerator’s latest initiatives and projects. With MDL directly involving the talented students at Central Saint Martins, the joint-venture aims to help students and young talent refine their creative ideas and activate for production. Santiago Matheus, Managing Director at Method and co-founder of MDL, discusses the reasons behind Method’s Involvement:
“The calibre of the students [Central Saint Martins] is unrivaled. You’ll see things at degree shows that you won’t find anywhere else. Our aim with the Method Design Lab is to turn these ideas into reality and to turn graduates into entrepreneurs in the process. It’s a chain that needs kickstarting.”
Yann Mathias and Boris Thuery, MDL Creative and R&D Directors also touch on some of the projects in the pipeline. One idea by Central Saint Martins student Hyungwoo Yoon is the Uniwrench, a universal wrench with a retractable claw, which is likely to be the first project to go into production this year.
Method is invested in helping to grow the global design community, and MDL’s latest initiatives are part of growing a talent pool of designers and entrepreneurs in the UK.
This 15-page feature reminds us about the importance of design and the value that experimentation, creativity and collaboration bring to businesses today. Method is also supporting the IncludeDesign campaign to defend the integrity of design in education in the UK.
Image courtesy of Engadget
London is gearing up for this year’s exciting Digital Shoreditch Festival, set for May 20th-26th. In preparation for the week-long celebration, voting has opened to decide which sessions will be featured in the conference’s amazing lineup.
Method Principal David Eveleigh-Evans has proposed a talk on Designing For A Just-in-Time World, and we need your help to get us on stage at DS13!
From the social graph through to the Internet of Things, we now have the ability to map and understand people’s behaviors in the digital and physical world better than ever before. This wealth of real-time user data introduces new opportunities to design unique experiences that can tailor products and services in context and at the point of interaction to individuals.
In an environment where there is constant feedback between people and the brands, products, and services they use, how can brands stay relevant while remaining true to what they stand for?
In this talk, David will explain how the experience is likely to become the only constant in a rapidly changing world. Help us get to Digital Shoreditch and support our session! Voting is open until February 22nd.
Vote for Designing For A Just-In-Time World here!
Community, Design thinking, Interaction Design
Method discusses the future of Interaction Design in ‘Connecting’
Connecting is a short documentary by Basset & Partners and Microsoft, exploring how our lives have shifted and will continue to shift in a more connected world. It features interviews with Method alumni, Raphael Grignani and Robert Murdock; along with designers from Twitter, Arduino, Frog, Stamen, Microsoft, and Nokia.
Discussing the components of interactive experiences and analyzing the societal and cultural impact of the coming new forms of technologies, the documentary beautifully epitomizes the current status of this hyper-connected world and how the growing relationship between technology and humans will ultimately change global behavior.
Basset & Partners sums up, “as the role of software is catapulting forward, Interaction Design is seen to be not only increasing in importance dramatically, but also expected to play a leading role in shaping the coming ‘Internet of things.’ Ultimately, when the digital and physical worlds become one, humans along with technology are potentially on the path to becoming a ‘super organism’ capable of influencing and enabling a broad spectrum of new behaviors in the world.”
Today, Co.Design featured Connecting and included their own list of takeaways from the film’s discussion:
- Our phones demand too much attention, detracting from our real experiences.
- Analog metaphors are making less sense on digital devices.
- We’re waiting for new paradigms in experiencing media like text on screens.
- UX is a living, somewhat unpredictable thing. All experiences need to be fluid and flexible now.
- You shouldn’t just try to understand a product. You should try to understand its connected network.
- An “Internet of things”–countless connected sensors–is coming (and here).
- All of our information feeds into something larger than ourselves, a “superorganism” or “colony” of digital information.
- The hive mind got so big that greater Internet thought is now manifesting locally (think Egypt’s uprising or Occupy Wall Street).
Let us know what you think – how will the role of Interaction Design change and grow in this increasingly hyper-connected world? How do you design a product to answer to our evolving communities, and changing problems?
image from PSFK.com
To ring in the new year, PSFK has tapped some of the world’s established innovators to share their insights into what we should be on the lookout for in 2013.
Among the fascinating minds on the list is Method Principal, Marc Shillum! Marc shares his predictions for what will happen to design in 2013, exploring the two important movements he sees happening parallel to each other in 2013. Read it here.
What do you think of Marc’s predictions? What do you think will happen in 2013? Let us know in the comments!
Which application should you use when designing for screens? It’s an old argument for which I’ve heard designers put forward the case for Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and even InDesign.
I’m a Fireworks fan (a conversation for another time), however the majority of the designers I have come across tend to favour Photoshop. What both of these applications have in common is the pixel. Traditionally we pick a canvas width such as the ever popular 960, set up a grid, and start giving the elements within the page nice exact pixel dimensions.
Even in the age of fluid design with varying screen sizes, we still pick a base size to design to and then convert these values into percentages so it all scales nicely. The important thing here of course is that the fluid design stays true to the proportions of the original design.
With vector based applications such as Illustrator, the concept of the pixel doesn’t exist in the same way. You can zoom to your heart’s content and never will your design turn into a bunch of tiny little squares. We see these “pixel-less” assets in the form of SVGs being used more often for exactly this reason. While you can still design in Illustrator using pixels as measurements if you choose to, this feature is really there to enable you to export your assets to those measurements. Once you remove the concept of a definitive output size, those pixel measurements become somewhat meaningless.
With the introduction of the Retina display on the new Mac Book Pro and presumably more and more hi-res screens on all kinds of shapes and sizes of devices, the concept of a pixel-orientated “base size” becomes irrelevant.
The new MacBook Pro has a 2880-by-1800-pixel resolution. That’s 3 million more pixels than an HDTV.
[Photo credit: Apple.com]
In the future, when we open a document to begin designing, will we simply enter the aspect ratio we are targeting, with all following measurements then being entered in percentage values of the width and height? How will designers define type sizes if there is no constant base unit to which they can refer? Or, to make matters even more complicated, what if there isn’t even a constant aspect ratio, such as on a scrollable page with indeterminate height, or a design which needs to target multiple devices with variable dimensions? If there is no constant dimension within the canvas we are designing, for how can we begin to define measurements?
The majority of the software designers use today is an evolution of software initially designed for print. When designing for print, we know the dimensions of the canvas for which we are designing. Elements can be positioned on the page using any number of units: millimetres, centimetres, inches. Take your pick. As these units are all constant, their relationship to the canvas is fixed, unlike our little variable sized friend, the pixel.
Will the tools we use to design for the screen need to be rethought so as to be “pixel-less?” Or will the pixel remain as a comfortable legacy unit? Furthermore, if the tools and mindset required to design for screen evolve, will we start to see a larger and less breachable gap between the disciplines of design for screen and design for print?
These are questions that will become more urgent as the industry and the platforms and technologies we design for and on continue to evolve. It’s also an exciting opportunity for an update in work processes and tools to match the new strategies and ways of thinking we are already adopting.
What do you think will happen to the software we use? Should we be prepared for a pixel-less future?
Read Marc Shillum‘s 10×10, ‘Brand as Patterns’ on Contagious Magazine.
Patterns are unique in the fact that they create consistency around difference and variation. Creating a consistent brand capable of existing in today’s agile and iterative environment begins with the formulation of coherent patterns. And a brand’s strategy, identity, products, services, and user experience design must be interdependent in order to create this coherent pattern.
Catch us in the latest issue of Communication Arts Magazine, with a full feature on our design process and culture.
The article takes an in depth look inside Method’s studios and the thinking that led to some of our recent work including the newly launched NBC Politics App and our work with Nokia’s digital retail experience. Featuring interviews with some of our thought leaders, we lend some insight into the strategy that drives Method’s work and culture
“At the end of the day, customers don’t care about a brand’s consistency,” Principal, Marc Shillum says, “they care about what’s interesting and relevant.” Finding new ways to reamin interesting, relevant and responsive is a goal that Method is eager to embrace as it looks to the next ten years of its future.
Download the full article here.
Director of Interaction Design, Ben Fullerton sits down with ...
Director of Interaction Design, Ben Fullerton sits down with World of Business Ideas for a quick chat around the power of design and the need for understanding consumer behavior to create better and more meaningful experiences.
Check out the video below! If you’d like to learn more about Ben, catch him on Twitter @BenFu.
In a recent article, Mashable evaluates the success of Instagram as a mobile app and asks a few experts to share their opinions on Instagram and whether mobile-only is really the next frontier for social networks.
Method’s own Interaction Design Lead, Jennifer Brook shares her insights:
“Instagram made a smart bet that we currently have more spare attention — more emotional and cognitive bandwidth — while using our mobile phones than we do when viewing a website on a desktop browser.
My iPhone gives me superpowers. My computer needs things from me. A kind of emotional transference then happens when looking at content on my mobile phone, it’s a treat to stay a little longer. I feel like I’m being let in on a secret. If you’re trying to discern a launch or product strategy, the baked-in intimacy and ubiquity of mobile shouldn’t be ignored.”
Read the original article here.