24 Jan 2010 0913H

Recent thoughts on Chinese design

Is it possible to talk about Chinese design when all Chinese designers have been taught about ways of looking, thinking, and form giving by Westerners? That the very value of design comes to Chinese design because of its engagement in the global late capitalist market flows of goods and services? A priori, I draw on the long body of work that tells us that ways of thinking, looking, and shaping are not without their own biases. They have their own histories, and that these ways of knowing give rise to presences that suppress absences and silences in order to legitimize and perpetuate their existence. In other words, design would appear to meet the criteria for what Foucault would have called a discursive formation. So if it is the case that western form-ways have basically colonised Chinese design, what does this mean for the future? Is it possible to disentangle Chinese design from the colonial yoke, so to speak?

I’m thinking no. The genie’s already out of the bottle. In essence, there is no design style that is sui generis “Chinese” per se. Perhaps even the notion of design itself, although it poses as universal, actually is historically conditioned by the West as a kind of discursive formation. At the risk of prematurely speaking, one cannot talk about Chinese design because Chinese designers have not begun to build a national discourse of their own, the narrative of seeing, thinking and shaping for themselves, out of “native”, pre-colonial design history, to solve their own problems using “native” ways of doing so, and not “imported” ways of doing so, such as constructivism, modernism, so on. Largely, when they use such techniques, they’re really only copying from others, doing “what the market tells them” will work, what someone has taught them.

Chinese Design, therefore, properly only refers to the act of form-giving in a more or less Western manner, with pre-colonial or traditional Chinese flourishes, by people who are Chinese or are designing for Chinese and maybe to a degree by foreigners living and working in China. This differs from big-letter Chinese Design because the work seen today does not stem from a purely, uniquely Chinese historical aesthetic tradition, but from the chaotic and tumultuous centuries of engagement with Western ways of form giving, as we see with product and advertising work, i.e. communications design from Hong Kong and Shanghai before the Second World War, and then of course the mainland engagement with the Soviet realist propaganda after 1949, and of course modernism and its discontents take over in Hong Kong after 1949 as well.

I doubt there will be a rejection and revolution in this regard, and I think it is too late for any rejection to be successful so as to “restart” Chinese Design ex nihilo. But, if this were undertaken, a wholesale rejection of western form ways, fashions, trends, and the like, basically, a return to pre-colonial Chinese aesthetics, perhaps then we might be able to talk about Chinese design as its own discourse. Perhaps because colonialism is part of the historical condition, therefore it is inescapable to talk about Chinese design without reference to the colonial masters.

Anyone who talks about Chinese design today cannot however elide or exclude this colonial form of intellectual history as if it does not exist, although it is telling to me why this has not been criticized more loudly. Chinese design cannot also, as I am seeing in a paper from Design Issues, be simply academically explained away by simplistic and outdated colonialist notions about Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, collective identity, so on: every such simplistic textbookish stereotype can be countered by the rich, direct knowledge gained from actual observation of the real conditions on the ground and the lived experiences of people, their histories, their aspirations and failings.

Permanent link to Recent thoughts on Chinese design

Filed under Design

2 Responses »

20 Jan 2010 1645H

On design thinking and public policy

Given the tremendous quantities of crap not just in products but in experiences that have been rendered unto the public by designers, and the industry’s collective failure to own up to its responsibility for that, design thinking or no, I think it would be not only premature but overly optimistic at best to turn the reins of public policy over to designers. We already do a good enough job screwing up products for people as it is: let’s not expand our scope.

Permanent link to On design thinking and public policy

Filed under Design

Respond »

29 Nov 2009 0833H

Black Friday internet sales up 35% over last year

“It was a stronger picture for Internet retailing. The average online order on Black Friday rose 35% from last year, to $170.19, according to online retail analyst Coremetrics — an indication that people may be looking to buy gifts after a year of economic woes.”

Link

Permanent link to Black Friday internet sales up 35% over last year

Filed under Strategy, User Experience, Web

Respond »

26 Nov 2009 0647H

Data visualization of Thanksgiving food trends in America

Fascinating visualization tool of American food trends this Thanksgiving by way of the New York Times.

Permanent link to Data visualization of Thanksgiving food trends in America

Filed under Information Design, User Experience, Visual Communications, Web

Respond »

25 Nov 2009 0645H

Re: Barnes & Noble’s Nook

Dear Mr. Frain: slash the price on the Nook. Give the thing away. Why? The real game is to sell books, not to sell Nooks, just like Microsoft and the other game companies. To compare with video games: if you have good product, as Nintendo planned, quite successfully, with the Wii against Microsoft’s XBox 360 and particularly Sony’s Playstation 3 — or for that matter, the Atari VCS versus the more advanced Mattel Intellivision or the Magnavox Odyssey 2, or the Nintendo 8-bit system vs. the Sega Genesis 16-bit system, the technology becomes practically irrelevant. It’s the things you do with that technology, not the technology itself. In fact, historically, anyone who sells on the technology alone winds up losing. Once everyone has one, then you can concentrate on what you all do best which is of course, selling books. These game companies take a hit on the consoles, but make it back up in the games. Similarly, you could look at music. Apple gives away iTunes, but makes it back up on the music. The iTunes is not the thing they profit on. Also, I think, cleverly, Apple made an agreement with Starbucks to deliver a free iTunes experience at any of their locations: you already have your own bricks and mortar space with free wifi. It would be trivial to have people come to an eBooks store when people log in. So drop the price on the Nook — I would even put out a Nook app for mobile to go toe-to-toe with Amazon and others — and make it easy to buy books, everywhere, anywhere. In fact, why not do this: buy a book in hardcopy format and get the softcopy free?

Permanent link to Re: Barnes & Noble’s Nook

Filed under Strategy, Technology, User Experience

Respond »

24 Nov 2009 1008H

New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Today observed my wife shopping online and cussing out the webpage at checkout. You see, she is one of the many people — not a majority of users certainly, but definitely a persona to be designed for — out there who I observed at Sears, MyGofer, Hallmark, Borders, Wilton, so on — who use the shopping cart as a kind of basket: they put things in as a kind of temporary holding area for later decision making. Later, right before checkout, as they review the cart, they remove the items that they don’t immediately want. Now if I were running the e-commerce strategy, this group of customers is not one I would ignore. They have already increased your lift, so, what you want is to push them to convert, perhaps by incentivising them to do so via special combination offers, such as Amazon has been offering for some time: Buy this item A and this item B together for $XX.XX and so on. Another thing I would do is probably to allow users to do a visual comparison in the cart, without taking the users back to the detail pages for those items. I might use a kind of special view of the cart to do this or preview in place. Now, originally I had deplored the use of the cart for anything more than a confirmation page directly proceeding to the checkout flow funnel, but, I have come to realize that the cart represents this opportunity, untapped, to press the advantage. Perhaps it is there that I would position the offer to buy both for a special price, or buy all the items at a special discount for same type items.

Permanent link to New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Filed under Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Strategy, User Experience

Respond »

19 Nov 2009 0748H

Experiential design in video games

Great article in the New York Times about the search for a great differentiating experience in video game design: Can DIY Supplant the First Person Shooter?

Permanent link to Experiential design in video games

Filed under Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience

Respond »

30 Oct 2009 1003H

30 second review in iTunes

Whoever designed this bit of interaction is worth their weight in gold. The feature — new to iTunes 9? — lets you reverse 30 seconds, an extremely helpful feature for audiobooks particularly. May have been one of these things you learn only by observing users.

Permanent link to 30 second review in iTunes

Filed under Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience

Respond »

28 Oct 2009 1429H

On great user interfaces

Great UI work can’t be done after the fact. Great UI can’t be a patch to things. It can only happen as a result of deep understanding of user needs and user testing. Once the product is rolled out, it’ll take a revolution to change what’s in place.

Permanent link to On great user interfaces

Filed under Interaction Design, Product Design, Usability, User Experience

Respond »

01 Sep 2009 1616H

So, what have you been up to?

Sit down, kiddies . . . listen to your ol’ Uncle Gene tell you a story. A little over a year ago, I stopped freelancing at Sears Online Services, where I’d been working for a beta service that Sears was looking at growing called MyGofer.com. We — meaning a team of about three IAs and a lead — were able to pull off a number of online shopping innovations which actually translated to the direct commerce site before tough economic times resulted in their circling the wagons. Quite surprisingly saw some assets archived that I and Ben Watson cut back in 2000 while working for Viant, don’t know what kinda holiday they were keeping that for!

Shortly thereafter interviewed with a bunch of different places: Amazon, which has a grueling interview process, and would have been quite exciting, except it seemed they weren’t interested so much in a user experience person as they were in someone who was more a designer who had UX chops; Critical Mass, which seemed very ad agency and interactive marketing driven, not much for usability and user experience practice; passed the stringent hiring process at TandemSeven, only to find no job waiting for me at the end due to the economic climate; talked to Fry, which seemed much like Brulant; talked to Acquity Group, which has great people, but the job was clearly not a good match for either of us. There were a lot of conversations that led nowhere. A lot of resumes submitted electronically, a lot of hustling. Finally got some work at Manifest Digital, which was alright, actually, took care of a bunch of us after a gig fell through after starting, and paid pretty well for a few months. Around October or so, I was very surprised to be approached by a recruiter for Siemens in the deep northwest suburbs, and started talking to them, and was faced with a pretty technical interview, but, clearly passed and was hired in short order. And since then it’s been a pretty interesting time.

It is at once disorientingly different and similar in strange ways. Because I am no longer working in e-commerce but in healthcare, on medical devices, the goals are of course quite different. We’re not developing methodologies either to pressure people into buying more or how to make it easier to find or buy things, aka, increasing lift and flow. We are however still helping users to achieve tasks and goals through interactions with an application. What we’re doing here is definitively traditional applications development, which doesn’t have web conventions, or the kinds of behaviors built into it that we’ve learned from the tens of millions of user behavior observations over the last 10 or more years. But then too, so many people have cast their lot onto the web that often times the desktop application development side has been overlooked as a result. I may take a course at Cooper Interaction Design in the near future, and there is a conference for improving the usability design of medical devices in Virginia later this month.

Mostly my disappearance from correspondence with you, my beloved readers, is due to me becoming familiar with this new work and the processes that we must undergo to ensure that the product gets launched in a safe and timely fashion. Our in-house process is fairly heavyweight, with oversight from peers and management and also compliance with international engineering and safety design standards, and the documentation process is also quite heavyweight as well. There have been things I haven’t had to design for before, such as whether or not an audible signal meets a sufficient level of loudness in decibels, or, a setup with two monitors. The team I work with has a mix of hardware and software competencies, people who came from other parts of the company from overseas, and there are clinical experts on staff. There are challenges working with an international team located at our headquarters in Forchheim, in Bavaria, Germany as well as in Bangalore in the state of Karnataka in India, the greatest of these is getting in the same time zone so we can get on the same page. Even though the common corporate language is English, I often find that a good interaction design diagram in the form of the particular kind of wireframes we learned to make at Sears Online Services (by way of Orbitz and so on) might makes things more helpful. But this requires that people be taught how to read them, and even when we used these diagrams at Sears, I didn’t think that the offshore team understood this stuff all that clearly. We’ll have to try a few approaches. I did show my German counterparts how we do this work here, and I don’t think they use the same methodology as I saw a few powerpoint presentations that demonstrate interaction. But none of these challenges is insurmountable, although, it does require quite a bit of time.

There have been plenty of site visits in the last year to meet with doctors, nurses, applications support and trainers. There are regulatory bars within this industry against gifts or tokens even for usability testing. Observing users is the same as usual, tasks, discount usability, so on, which is complicated by the kind of users we deal with. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing has been those moments when a patient is wheeled into the laboratory for an emergency procedure, or seeing an already very ill patient during a procedure, and usually the intervention must take place then or surgery for bypass must be scheduled immediately. It is at that moment that you realize that the kind of work that you are doing is important, far more important than almost anything else you have ever done in your life, because you are crafting tools that will enable someone to make decisions about someone else’s life. If that person was related to you, or was you yourself, wouldn’t you want that tool to be as precise and as easy to use as possible? And so, for all my complaining, I actually find myself quite deeply engaged in the work that I feel I should have been doing all these years.

Permanent link to So, what have you been up to?

Filed under Interaction Design, Product Design, Technology, User Experience, Work

Respond »

« Older entries Newer Entries »