Khoi Vinh, a voice of reason, finally weighs in on the debate with "In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible." Apparently he also thinks that most of the arguments against design thinking are anti-democratization.
So when I consider design thinking, it matters less to me whether it leads to a lot of bad design or not. What matters to me is whether it helps broaden the language of design, if it helps expand the community of design, if it helps build a world that values and understands design better than it does today. If design thinking is making us more relevant to the world at large, leading non-designers to embrace the way designers think, then the net effect strikes me as positive.
I think the headline is bait and the sentiment is a little radical — as someone who's been working with more behavioral-based personas for a long time, I'd say there's plenty of use personas still have as a design tool. It's just that people, especially marketers, have been using them poorly for years.
However, Microsoft's inclusive "persona spectrum" idea is great. It helps to demonstrate that accessibility and inclusion aren't just about (for instance) serving blind users, they're about serving everyone in as many cases as we can.
Following up on all the bad takes on design thinking (some of which they published), Fast Co has a small interview with an IDEO partner about why everyone suddenly hates design thinking. Short answer: it's just a tool, and one that looks shiny enough that there are tons of people using it poorly.
This article came out early last year, but PURE is a new-to-me usability evaluation method from Intel Security and the master of UX metrics, Jeff Sauro. I'm always looking for low-impact, low-cost ways of evaluating the usability of features before (or, god forbid, in lieu of) a full moderated test.
In some cases, that can be done. Even if you're against the idea as a useful method on its own, it can point to the places that need to have full testing done on them. PURE is nice because a decently-trained person can do it without having to hold tons of heuristic guidelines in their head. And you get a pretty nice-looking chart result at the end.
I've created a spreadsheet that calculates up the scores, and some Figma components to build the chart. I think this might be the case I've been looking for to develop a tool for Figma using their API.
Not long after the recent Fast Co article by the bigtime Pentagram designer about how Design Thinking sucks, here's that bastion of both design and progressive thinking, the... Harvard Business Review? The thing that the author is mad about does not seem to be the kind of design thinking that I have either implemented or learned.
The whole point of "human centered design" is to eliminate the concept of the designer dictating from on high. The version the author refers to, where a holy anointed designer filters the input of the unwashed masses, is something I'm wholly against as well. After all, I went to a two-year for-profit design school. Iskander has the right idea: we should be democratizing design and acting on the bottom-up, boots-on-the-ground perspective that we get from users/customers/beneficiaries and from non-designers in our organization. Unfortunately, it feels to me like she's been given a tainted version of design thinking -- one that I think a lot of other people have also received.
My cognitive dissonance here is that these articles written by people named Natasha can't both be true. Jen, highfalutin Pentagram partner, can't be right about design thinking usurping the dominance of designers like her while Iskander is simultaneously right about the methods actually maintaining that dominance.
At the end of the day, design thinking is, as Iskander says, a dumbed-down scientific method. So to my mind, what you do with that hypothesize-and-test framework can be conservative (blarg), innovative (bleh), or serve people well, depending on your hypotheses, the makeup of your team, and the projects you're working on. Keep the tools in your toolbox, keep serving the people you're designing for, and you'll be fine.
I sat down with my son (5) and the Alesis Micron that is now anchoring my live set and we made a little track together. It was going to be called "Disco Slash" but for unknown reasons, he retitled it to the less inspiring "Disco Party." I helped with the mechanics but all the sequencing is him.
Here's cool video with Tony Visconti discussing the creation of "Heroes," the title song of maybe the best of Bowie's Berlin albums. It's amazing just to hear the multi tracks — Fripp's brilliant feedback guitar, the crack band, and Bowie's vocal takes, which get written about a lot but prove his power when you hear them on their own.
It'd be easy to take away that the era of true studio innovation with giant budgets and beautiful studios is mostly at an end so we'll never get great records like this anymore, but it's all there available to us. You could recreate so many of these things and more in your own house. The inspiration is what's important, and there's a lot of it in this video.
One of the more fun things about playing electronic music is figuring out how to perform live. To some people, Ableton Live and its external controllers made the question moot. And to a large number of others, Elektron’s highly playable devices have become the de facto way of low-impact performance design.
But when you’re not interested in bringing out a computer and you don’t have nice Elektron stuff, creating a way to connect and perform on your equipment is a fun and sometimes ridiculous challenge.
Various Reasons, for me, has always been about this. And usually it’s been a little too complicated and unreliable to make things easy to play. But discovering some of the features of my Alesis Micron has really opened up my options.
What it is
Today, my setup starts with the (non-pro) Arturia BeatStep, which mostly provides master clock but runs the sequence on a couple songs. It’s a fun way to run things because even though I can’t hard-wire a tempo to songs, the analog clock helps me go by “feel” a little bit.
From there, the MIDI chain goes to the Micron, which can run a multi-track sequencer. Unfortunately, having multiple sequences in songs means holding down keys and moving your finger around. That’s fine in some cases, and in others I’ve adapted tunes to use the same bassline moved around in key. There can even be rhythms.
In theory, a whole song can be built on the Micron, but I consider my modded Alesis HR-16 to be a signature part of my sound. So that is next in the chain. The snare runs to a cheap delay pedal to help alter sounds and add dubby effects to the beats. From there, I send MIDI clock to my Arturia Microbrute, which is almost always running an arpeggiator timed to that clock. It goes through a preamp for distortion and a Catalinbread spring reverb.
The last piece is a Korg Volca Keys. I use it for pads, leads, and with the aid of a Hotone Wally looper, transitions between songs for less awkward silence while I change patches. The hardest part of this is hitting keys, but I don’t have a small enough MIDI controller to justify bringing out something else.
It’s not the simplest setup I have. There are quite a few connections, and a couple analog synths with no patch recall. It does make changing parts within songs much easier than my previous setup, which had me running around like a crazy person trying to change patterns on multiple sequencers — some of which require two fingers. It’s got a bit of a shambolic timing, which is not ideal in some cases, but a lot more interesting and unique than a perfect computer or Octatrack clock. An audience member described it as “raw,” but to excerpt some of the lyrics, it’s also a mess of tangled wires.
In the quest for audio perfection, I've found myself trying yet another tool.
This time it was thanks to a mastering project — at the end of the day I still ended up doing mastering in DSP-Quattro, an unreliable piece of software that nevertheless is a dedicated mastering DAW. When you need things like crossfades, effects on regions, and DDP export... you need them. It's another 300 bucks to upgrade Studio One to the version that has a mastering workflow, so guess who isn't doing that? I'm continually frustrated by DSP-Quattro's odd workflows and constant crashing, but it does the job eventually.
In the meantime, though, I gave REAPER a shot at it. If you're not familiar, Reaper (it's an acronym but I get really tired of capitalizing it) is a constantly-developing DAW that carries a $60 price tag for amateurs and $225 for pros. My impression of Reaper has always been that it's a technician's tool or "computer person" version of a DAW. That is to say, kind of the opposite of Pro Tools's heavy mimicry of a console-based workflow. One thing that its proponents are always fond of pimping is the customization. Reaper can, within reason, work any way you want it to, but there's a massive learning and setup curve to get there.
Or maybe not. Turns out, it isn't that hard to do a lot of the customizations that force Reaper to work the way you want to work, from tool behavior to making F3 toggle the mixer like Pro Tools.
It also sounds at least as good as Studio One, and has a much cleaner, more native-feeling interface than it used to. And I think that the the "computer-like" focus of the UI as opposed to slavish console worship is actually a strength. There are no audio or MIDI tracks, just tracks, and there are no groups, VCAs, or busses. Every track can be anything, so it supports an "as you go" creative workflow. Takes and playlists work easily.
The shortcoming that most DAWs run up against versus Pro Tools is always audio editing, so that remains to be seen.
I'm going to continue any client work that comes along in Studio One, but try the next An Empty Room recording with Reaper and see how it goes.
