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With Emergence over, my attention has turned to my neglected theses endeavors. Earlier this week I bought a bunch of books, some of which arrived the past few days.

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) by Bill Buxton
• The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon
• Design Methods by John Chris Jones
• How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified by Bryan Lawson
• Design Thinking by Peter G. Rowe
• A Sense of Self: The Work of Affirmation by Thomas J. Cottle

I skipped right to the end of How Designers Think to a chapter called “Towards a model of designing” as I’m interested in model that attempts to explain what’s happening between research and actual design. I found the following tidbits intriguing.

Unfortunately, the really interesting things that happen in the design process may be hidden in designers’ heads rather than being audible or visible.

And…

Designing is far too complex a phenomenon to be describable by a simple diagram.

I’m wondering if these two statements alone make my investigation moot.

I had a conversation today with a Henning Fischer, a coworker at Adaptive Path, about design process, which got me blabbering something about my thesis paper proposal, tentatively titled the Leap from Research to Design in Interaction Design. I had not looked at it since writing it during finals week, so tonight I read what I wrote.

I cringed a bit while reading it, and invite you to cringe along with me.

Only so much can be gained from user research. At some point, the designer must make a leap from what are seen as the user needs and desires to something that doesn’t exist and that users alone could not identify.

Designers have a reputation for performing magic in the creation of new and innovative products, rather than by a rigorous process that other disciplines and clients understand. Although there have been efforts to establish methods, tools, and models for design practice, designers also need to be flexible enough to create their own tools and methods, diverging from codified methods and models.

Interaction designers need to understand the leap from user data to design in both their own process and in communicating their value to others. I want to explore attempts to model this process, whether they work, and perhaps suggest a new model for understanding the mysterious forces of design in interaction design.

I love my strategic use of “perhaps.” Perhaps I chose it because a model is not what I want to create.

A couple months ago I talked with Shelley Evenson about models and design process. She suggested that there isn’t a single process that can be employed because each design problem is unique. Processes are derived from the needs demanded by the problem. I felt this was a good perspective, and true to my experience.

When I told Henning I was interested in Adaptive Path’s design process, he seemed to interpret that I meant a modeled process. So he said AP does not have one. Good, I thought. But there is still a process. And it remains a curious thing how designers bridge user research to design solution, and that’s what I’m interested in for my thesis paper.

Wrestling with this issue came from my experience this past semester in translating user needs into something that doesn’t exist and that users could not ask for directly because of its nonexistence, and also with trying to evaluate the how user research was indeed influencing the end result even when it seemed like at some point the research was being forgotten. It seemed important to both understand the value of user research and at the same time forget about it.

It also arose from the many readings from the last semester, many of which came from the HCI community. There seems to be some effort to model design. I see HCI embracing design, but applying it’s scientific and analytical slant—wanting to quantify the process. This seems to also have an influence on the interaction design discipline, at least from an academic perspective. I understand the need to demonstrate the value of interaction design, but modeling the process like a quantifiable thing troubles me. It doesn’t feel right.

In relation to understanding the connection in my life between writing and design, I was inspired to read a comparison of the craft of writing to the craft of design in David Wroblewski’s “The Construction of Human-Computer Interfaces Considered as a Craft” from Taking Software Design Seriously. This was required reading for our seminar 2 class.

There seems to be a connection between the writing process and design process (Wroblewski’s references John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Bill Strickland’s On Being a Writer). This connection has surfaced in other readings as well, especially those we read last semester for Richard Buchanan.

Creating a piece of good writing is a wicked problem: an ambiguous problem with a solution that cannot practically be found or measured. A good idea and some words thrown on paper will not necessarily generate a strong piece of writing, just like a good idea or some applied technology will not necessarily result in a product that connects with users.

Both are iterative processes. Almost always, a strong piece of writing is not the first thing written. Similarly, even if you frame the problem well and have solid research, the first idea for a solution will likely not be the final design.

In On Being a Writer, John Steinbeck says (Wroblewski uses this quote):

Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class on story-writing at Stanford. I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyed and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done.

This fits nicely with our graduate study program in design, whereby we are really only given guidance and tools to create a good design and an environment to evaluate the designs we have created. Though we are not, and cannot be, given the secret formula for creating good design.

However, maybe that’s how it works for a lot of things. There is no formula for success. No secret to happiness. Life, it may be argued, is like the process of design or the process of writing. The end is ambiguous, and there are multiple solutions for the same problem. The only way to live life is to live life. Only after can we see how it was done.

The web process book for my team’s mobile information project is complete. Here’s your chance to see the process and final demonstration of the GoCoffee interface.

The next project for the class, designing a digital music player, has already begun with new teams. My team is designing a wearable music device for commuters. Our initial round of user research is due tomorrow.

No time to waste.

The process book for my data visualization project is due tomorrow. I initially finished it on Friday.

On Saturday, I printed a draft and showed it to someone. Too much white space, he said.

Six weeks into design school, I simply cannot ignore a comment like “too much white space.” So I spent time on Saturday and Sunday resizing images, adjusting type, and changing the layout.

After each iteration I thought: I can make this better. However, this may be a lesson in knowing when to say it’s good enough, and not perfect, because at some point it just has to be done.

And that’s where I am right now. Yet to be printed.