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  • DesignUp 🍰 Issue #95 > 5 yrs | JonK's Top 5 Reads, meta & multiverse, maps for 🛵 & much more

DesignUp 🍰 Issue #95 > 5 yrs | JonK's Top 5 Reads, meta & multiverse, maps for 🛵 & much more

March 22, 2021

Another issue packed to the brim with ideas and inspiration! It also celebrates 5 years of the Newsletter. And we have a wonderful guest editor joining us for this anniversary issue - Jon Kolko, who shares 5 of his all favourite reads. There's 2021 newness and the archives: reads from 5 years ago - they've aged well. Plus there's metaverse, multiverse and not giving people what they want - thoughtfully put together by Soo.

👓 J

DesignUp Newsletter is 5 years old this week!

The first DesignUp newsletter was published by @jdallcaps on Mar 28, 2016. It was called UxPowerUps then and focused on universal themes of design practice like rethinking and rebuilding for discovery, the need to have multiple perspectives, and more. Take a look at those ageless reads below. But first, a special guest column from Jon Kolko!

Jon is the Chief Operating Officer, and a Partner, at Modernist Studio, and the Founder of Austin Center for Design. He's written six books, including Well Designed: How to use Empathy to Create Products People Love, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Jon was a speaker at DesignUp Festival in 2019 and his talk should be on our YouTube channel soon 🔔 hint: subscribe

Guest Column: Jon Kolko shares his Keepers list

Jon says: Over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, my wife and I spent time downsizing our library of books. As we made piles of what to keep and what to donate, I found a common theme in my "keepers" - titles that I held on to, that even after shaping the discipline of design, have outlived the fads and trends of innovation, user experience, lean UX, design thinking, and more. These are some of those books.

by Donald A. Schon

As I've become more experienced, I've become more interested in how I design, rather than what I design. Schon explores how we work through a complex problem with diagramming and drawing, making strategic decisions and tactical changes, often without even knowing why we're doing what we're doing. Learning about this has helped me become a better teacher; I can make my tacit process explicit for students who are just beginning their journey of making things.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander

Alexander's work was an early attempt to map the pattern language designers use to a series of repeatable methods that can be taught and learned. Methods are a valuable way for new designers to learn their craft, because it gives them a starting point into a process that appears magical. For me, one of the most interesting parts of Alexander’s work is ultimately his rejection of these methods, as they serve to diminish the spark of "art" infused into good design.

Mental Models by Philip Johnson-Laird

Johnson-Laird focused his academic explorations on the psychology of reason, particularly in contexts that are creative and ill-structured. This was one of the first bodies of work that helped me realize the connective tissue between words, ideas, and structures - that everything is connected, and traversing the connections leads us to design "solutions" with ease.

Dewey's thoughts on experiential learning are at the heart of my own education, and my own teaching philosophy. Dewey describes why what we now call "project-based learning" is so effective in helping students build repeatable approaches to addressing complex problems. His work is at the heart of every valuable and effective design education workshop or program.

I struggle through this text every time I read it, and each time, my struggle pays off. Simon offers me the counter to the liberal and flexible nature of design, providing an attempt at defining the science of design, and I always end my reading with a refined perspective on my own approach and the role of rationality in the context of addressing irrational or poorly contained problems.

As a practitioner, it's easy to focus on the quick and easy - the simple blogs or business books with case studies and top-ten lists of takeaways. I read these too, and enjoy them.

But from time to time, I need to remind myself of why I do what I do, why I love it so much, and why it’s difficult and rewarding. These are the books that help me continually evolve and grow.

You can read more of Jon’s writing at http://www.jonkolko.com and can explore Modernist Studio at http://www.moderniststudio.com.

Soo: If you haven’t read Jon's book Well Designed: How to use Empathy to Create Products People Love - do check it out. It’s a great book for designers and product managers.

The 5 year mark also reminded us that while some things do take a long time...see this lovely street art by Tanner Woodford

#PaintGary #PaintGary is a movement organized to fill the City of Gary with vibrant and thought-provoking public art. It plans to make the city into a larger-than-life canvas for by transforming vacant lots and wall surfaces with a series of creative sculptures and murals.

Google Maps for Two Wheelers

Here’s a fascinating talk by Lauren Celenza & Rajiv Arjan from Google about building a new experience for users over 12,000 kilometres away... This is from 2018 and recently moved from our sign-in Vimeo pages to our open-to-all YouTube channel 🎈We expect to move over 30 talks in 2021 over here 🔔 if you missed the hint earlier: subscribe 🎥

What's new 2021?

One word I learned recently was "non-fungible" - what about you? Have you experienced Calmtainment or taken a Workcation yet? Ten words for the new normal.

And just in time, this keynote from IXDA21 by Brenda Romero. She asks, who determines who is in the metaverse and who gets left out? Our metaverses are mirrors of their creators.

It's made with "every classified document leaked by pro-privacy whistleblower Edward Snowden", and minted by a "cryptodadaist" called @SHL0MS...

From UxPowerUp Issue #01, to rethink and rediscover

What makes a product great? I struggle with this question because being great is not just being better than good. Greatness is to goodness as wisdom is to smarts. Just like getting smarter and smar…

This debate is not about pleasing the customers, but the mistaken assumption that what people want is a fixed factor. The School of Life suggests we look at the history of Culture. Read on...

Lastly...

A peek into design history with Steve Jobs - well-known for never giving people what they said they wanted - brainstorming with the team at NeXT.

And finally, here's God trying to create the multiverse, but can he do it?

Yay!! You made it to the end of this newsletter! See you in 2 weeks - stay safe, stay inspired