Category Archives: Design Process

Designing experiences

Some interesting ideas on experience in the office, more here

The heads-down technical experience

Engineers who work on equipment often need to be able to work next to it. They also need to be able to easily access reference material. Some engineers need to solder.

  • Equipment at the workstation, in racks, on special shelves, etc. With appropriate power and connection.

  • Work surfaces for the job, such as lab-level bench, space for two computers, etc.

  • Sufficient storage as appropriate for the job.

    • Local storage for immediate access.

    • Other accessible storage for longer-term items.

    • Ergonomic considerations taken into account.

  • Secure equipment, either at workstation or nearby storage.

  • Transport at hand as needed, such as trolley that stores under the workbench.

  • Appropriately flexible phone system, eg. with wireless headset to allow talking with customers whilst walking to equipment.

The community and team experience

Although many field are in and out, they still feel a sense of community. Some people work alone and feel a sense of isolation.

Create a sense of identity

  • ”¦for individuals, workgroups and visitors.

  • Distinct color scheme and lighting effects that enables immediate identification.

  • Transition at boundaries that signifies movement into the identified area and gives a sense of arrival.

  • Zones within overall workspace that enclose and identify groups and shared areas.

  • Ability to personalize individual and group spaces.

  • People magnets which draw diverse people together to share information and socialize.

    • Eg. coffee bars at copy centers with information and connectivity.

  • Visual connection with others, for example lower partitions to allow people to see one another. Balanced with height for zoning and perceived privacy.

Enable shared activity

”¦within teams and the field.

  • Team meeting spaces close to their individual workstations.

  • Individual meeting space at workstation only for those with specific needs.

  • Larger meeting rooms for group get-togethers.

  • Noise minimization between the sounds of talking and those who have a need for quiet.

  • Private space where confidential conversations can be held.

  • Social space that allows serendipitous, chance conversation. Give a purpose to be there (as ‘people magnets’ above).

  • Technology-enabled space with net connect at all places and PC projection in meeting rooms.

Picasso’s 7 tips to success

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From the positivity blog:

1. "He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law,

2. I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it,

3. Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working,

4. Action is the foundational key to all success,

5. Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not,

6. If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes,

7. Youth has no age."

 

Urban Dictionary

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A dictionary for the rest of us. A few examples:

Office Nazi: Any manager or manager wannabe that is constantly citing the rule book and forbiding fun behavior. Especially prominent in the IT industry.

"I was checking out UrbanDictionary.com when the office nazi caught me!"

Workahol: what workaholics are addicted to.

Desk: "Confucius say: Secretary not part of office furniture, unless screwed on desk"

Phone tennis: Describes a repeated failure of two people to establish verbal contact with other over the telephone, resulting in an alternating series of voicemail messages (or messages left with flatmates, etc), bouncing back and forth between the two parties.

Phone tennis: Is usually unintentional and frustrating. Though in exceptional circumstances could be used as a stalling tactic.

Most common where
1) either or both callers do not have a mobile phone
2) either or both mobiles are often switched off or unheard
3) either or both phones are often engaged
4) both caller have busy schedules
5) both callers know they are meant to have a difficult conversation but would prefer to avoid it

"I’ve been playing phone tennis with her all day, it’s getting ridiculous"

And I have added: (more to come later)

Design Victim: A design victim will decorate his or her house by the book, ie. follow the latest trends in magazines, tv shows etc… According to a design victim absolutely everything in their house should be designed: from the teapot (Alessi), to the toilet brush (Starck). The sole aim in life of the design victim is to have a magazine publish his or her interiors. Most relationships with design victims end up in divorce.

Example of a design victim’s dialogue: "Darling how many times do I have to tell you not to wear those red slippers in the bedroom, your suppose to walk bare-footed on a Karim Rashid rug!"

Chess, Design and the Jury.

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In 1990 while waiting for a river boat to take me into Guatamala, I played a game of chess with a Danish guy who was waiting as well. The setting could have come straight out of a Werner Herzog film, the borderpost was nothing more than a wooden hut with a covered veranda in front and a couple of gringo’s  playing chess.  Somehow, I was confusing my Danish opponent at the beginning of the game, as he kept proclaiming: " that’s an interesting move." He was a keen chess player and was very, very hard looking for patterns. Alas, I play as patternless chess as my grandmother bought shoes (sometimes too small, sometimes too big). I left him little time to remain confused, as my pattern is one of no pattern. I  think that design is somehow similar to playing chess, some see patterns while others can’t seem to find them, however hard they look.

The reason I bring this up, is that one of the award wining projects of The Great Indoors was won by Item Idem. The award went for their design of the Bernhard Willhelm flagship store in Tokyo for Bus Stop Co. The project seems to be following my chess playing pattern in their design. The jury’s report says absolutely nothing: " [the] interiors illustrate a refusal to acknowledge the existence of the immediate surroundings". (Could be said of any interior in Tokyo). I think Item Idem are trying to fabricate an anti-design, anti-pattern by creating a seemingly disorder while disorganizing the products within the space. (OK, that can be said about anything in Tokyo).

But hold on, the road here leads into two directions: a jury or a client reading something that I suspect was never intended in the first place by the one initiating it (but because the game did not have to be "played all the way" could get away with it.) And then there is the deliberate choice of selling shit as shit not unlike Piero Manzoni or Marcel Duchamp did. Nothing wrong with either approach. The video on You Tube reveals a lot of the Bernard Willem’s shopkeepers, the Japanese girls don’t understand questions in Japanese so they answer in English, but that does not matter. 

The question really is whether Item Idem consciously tried to go patternless? (Let’s call it "The Guatamala Opening Move") Or is it the jury who has been lost in the game? Not unlike my Danish opponent who was completely at lost with my anarchistic chess moves? Will we ever know? My mind goes back to that game on the sunset drenched Guatamalan riverbed which, to my shame, lasted only 15 minutes or so. But imagine our boat had arrived 5 minutes in the game, today I might be a chess legacy in Denmark.

Architecture and methodology

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When one thinks about architecture and methodology "architectural programming" or brief formulating" come to mind. These are the techniques for formulating a creative process. As Robert Kumlin has written an excellent book on the subject of architectural programming, so I will not touch on it here.

The creative process is only one issue of the spectrum I have in mind when using the word methodology. At Waseda I thought for six years methodology to first year students, and we looked at the various methodological ideas and systems, such as Aristotle’s method of induction, phase space or Kepler’s backflips to make mathematical relations fit natural phenomena.

What I am interested in as I write about methodology and architecture, is to see the shifts that have been taking place within the process of architecture as a system. (I have written about this in the book: eBussines and Workplace Redesign) When we talk about architecture as a system then we need to look at what is happening both within as well as at the forces outside of architecture. I believe that there have always been two, opposing forces in place: internal and external. With internal and external I don’t mean the interior and the exterior of the space, but an entangled kind of yin-yang duality that pushes the process of architecture along. And with process I mean a persistent structure or a quality that follows a Darwinian path. This stucture is an evolutionary process that modifies the hierarchical elements of architecture slowly but at certain points the structure takes on catastrophic proportions. Our main interest thus should be towards these "modifiers". The internal and external forces are what create the shifts within the system.
Even though the system will remain open ended, in itself as a methodology it is closed. It is however important to take into consideration that these internal as well as external modifiers have always been dormant within the system, there is nothing new, and as such the system is complete. The changes are taking place only in the hierarchical interrelationships within the system.

The question of architecture and methodology really is: What is driving the formulation of our spaces?

Let us for example look at Buckminster Fuller’s methodology. Here we can see how internal and external factors shape Bucky’s design, and through his 4D thinking we can see that internally his focus has been on ways to reduce materiality while creating higher structural strength, what he calls “tensegrity”. External factors are, for example, his ideas for the Wichita house where a factory assembly line that during WW2 was building bomber planes, Bucky envisioned to be changed to a house-building plant.
I will add some more examples later on, as I think this is unchartered territory. It will tell us from a historical perspective the contribution certain architects have had on the progress of architecture. I wonder whether we would be able to able to pinpoint the catastrophic shifts within the system when we map enough of these modifiers?

Child’s play

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Britain’s commission for architecture and the built environment has created a site for 11-16 year olds to learn about the concepts of design. Using a series of questionnaires children (anyone actually) can learn the importance to balance functionality, build quality and impact. Never too young to learn.

Which places work

Q2: How much?

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Do the prices for constructing an office in Japan make sense?Of course not. The problem really is that in most office buildings in Japan the building owner has a designated contractor in place. This means that when you want to partition off rooms, create a reception etc… you need to ask the building contractor to do the work. And guess what, this designated contrator is going to present you with inflated prices to do the work… This is obviously one of the reasons why most Japanese office look the way they do: in order to avoid considerable construction costs offices are designed (put into place) with the intention of not having to cost an arm and a leg. That is why most meeting rooms walls in these office will not go all the way up to the ceiling (to avoid moving air conditioners) or have very few partitioned rooms at all.

Designated contractors seem to be unavoidable, especially with rents going up again to bubble times. Does this mean that we are going to see more offices “designed” by the restrictions of the designated contractors? Probably.

So how can you make sure that you can still design a funky work environment without a spicy price tag?

1. Negotiate before signing the lease that some of the work can be outsourced to other contractors. Make sure that the designated contractor has competition!
2. The design should be well thought through, and drawings handed in should have all the necessary details so there is no need for any guessing on the contractor’s side. Remember they will always guess in their favour.
3.  Buy a thick red marker and scrutinize the estimates. Check for product prices, contractors should normally get 40-60% discounts, not providing discounts will drive their fees up twice as they will charge a percentage (usually 12%) on top of the construction costs.

4. Hire a professional. Actually that is what you should have done in the first place!

On the Value of Design: 10 lessons. 10: The idea

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In the end it all comes down to the idea. Obviously there is no single “idea”. Didn’t Plato say that we don’t invent anything new, just remember what we’ve forgotten? James Webb Young has identified in the classic publication: “A technique for producing ideas” the various parts that an idea-person will need to go through to be able to come up with great ideas. And remembering “forgotten ideas” is one of them. An idea will come from having a ” vast library” of images, texts, experiences in ones mind and being able to connect these with the issues at hand. I have written earlier on this blog about seeing it. James Young describes this very graphically as before there is the idea it feels like one is on a vast ocean, while all of a sudden an island pops up. Sailing on the vastness of a homogenic blueness, the island appears, but it has a foundation on which it is based.

Analogous the idea must have a foundation as well, and this can be a combination of hard facts as well as semingly unrelated elements or disciplines. While studying architecture, I hardly read any books on “architecture”, but was more interested in books on geography, or psychology. Multi and cross disciplinary studies are the thing for producing ideas, stepping out, over borders, having no respect for limitations, undulging in imitations and healthy plagiarism is what we need if we want to come up with ideas. Tom Peters is urging for companies to take on designers on their boards, my arguement is to create a mix of disciplines and backgrounds in any team or board. Don’t forget that Darwin was a geographer by training and stumbled into biology to formulate evolution theory and Einstein was a third class engineer. The future is to the Jack of all trades who can bring in unusual perspectives and thus great ideas.

On the Value of Design: 10 lessons. 9: Never ending

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Design never ends. That is what makes design live and sets it aside from theatre design. Let me explain, one of my favourite films is The Royal Tenenbaums. The set, the house in which the story takes place, is so strongly present in the film, it makes me watch the film over and over again, the set almost is the film. Woody Allen‘s Interiors and James Ivory’s Remains of the day (or most of Ivory’s films) are heavily dependend on the interiors for the mood of these films.

But this however remains out of reach for us, (ahumm) real-life designers, we can try to set a mood, but (and this is my personal opinion), I believe that the design should live and the architect should let go and leave the space to itself. I don’t believe in “total design”. Total design can only become total failure. Thus we should strive to design without an end in sight, leaving space for change. (Didn’t Rem Koolhaas once said that without architecture anything is possible?)
Examples of failure are numerous, in Chandigarh one can witness urban planning that strived but ultimately failed in creating a perfect city. Actually the failure is what makes the city interesting, banning cows failed, keeping it clean failed and the traffic lights were not working when I travelled through it.

In the October issue of the Harvard Business Review, there was a short article called “Embrace the dark side”. The author Michael Fanuele argues that companies should stop “selling fairy tales in a reality-TV world” and “that imperfections can actually be a source of great appeal”. I could not agree more: design, like brands, needs authenticity for it to become really acceptable. And authenticity can only come from design that does not take itself too serious and leaves the end open ended.

On the Value of Design: 10 lessons. 8: Emotion

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Design is emotion. It talks to our senses, and sometime in its most extreme form it does not make sense any more. When Stendhal went to Italy, he suffered a case of temporary madness or, in his own words:

“I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.”

This reaction to the overwhelming amount of art, architecture and history is called Stendhal’s syndrome, tourist disease or Jerusalem syndrome.

Gaziella Magherini wrote a book about the Stendhal syndrome, in it she observed that
during the mirroring between the art and the subject a sublime, aesthetic, and uncanny event occurs. The art experience hooks a repressed trauma beneath the conscious sea of the subject rapidly pulling the trauma to the surface. The subject acts much like a distressed fish out of water.

Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi wrote a book called Lovemarks which looks at people’s emotional relation with products, or “loyalty beyond reason” as Roberts calls it. We buy products not only out of necessity, but as a way to express ourselves. The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the vodka we drink, are all becoming part of our extended selves. Isn’t it normal that we start to feel emotional when we go shopping, overwhelmed with the variety of products and choices?
Early modern architects and designers tried to remove the emotional aspect from the design of cities, architecture and products. Le Corbusier spoke of the house as a machine for living, and wanted to start from zero, tabula rasa, a purist and fuctionalist design. However, I believe that we leave this all behind us and will see the emotional, humanistic aspect of design becoming dominant. (again)