I've gained a new appreciation of the importance and difficulty of design as I've wrestled with digital design problems over the past few years.
These days I marvel at the little flatpack I can assemble into a cute little filing cabinet.
I look at the manholes in the busways and think "Wow, someone had to think of how maintenance would be done in the bus tunnel."
I look at a html page and think "Wow!"
"WOW!"
I see the structure, I pick up some phrases, I so want to read the document but the next thought is "No!"
It's a problem for me.
One of my major goals is to learn how to make a WordPress blog myself.
I keep making bookmarks and putting it off. I've been putting it off for three months now.
It took years to learn Flash, mainly because I didn't have access to the program - and then I was confronted with Design!
I've learned to make do.
I do what I can, accept any advice that might be forthcoming but given my shortcomings and the constraints of time - if it works I'm happy.
I know "It's just like that record player."
It plays records, CDs and FM radio and you can make MP3s off records.
But the layout of function buttons is quirky and it takes long way round.
The Power Button is where I expect the eject button to be.
Push "Power on" and it defaults to the CD player.
The CD player has to initialize before the function button works to flip to the record player or radio.
The CD eject button is up one from the other CD buttons.
What the heck was the designer thinking?
All the toil!
Am I mad? I'm grasping for things far beyond my reach.
Can I do better? I'm going to a master class by tomorrow by Information Architects Tokyo CEO Oliver Reichenstein who has a pretty impressive CV.
It's a X Media Lab workshop on News and the Spectrum of User Experience - he's also speaking at the XML Media Update for 2010. The reason this former newspaper journalist started thinking digital is because she heard Richard Titus, the co-founder of Schematic speak at the Screen Producers of Australia Association's conference in 2004-2005. Titus, formerly the BBC's Controller of Future Media and the Controller of User Experience and Design is now the CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital.
I'm really looking forward to hearing what he has to say this time. When I first heard him speak future trends (TiVo) and long tails (Amazon), I didn't know what a content management system was and I had no desire at all to learn programming - I was interested in writing. I taught myself Photoshop in between migrating a ton of content under tight nightly deadlines.
I took leave to attend Flash courses which I paid for.
I listened to Australian business people producing mobi-sodes and webi-sodes talk at AFTRS and SPAA Fringe.
I continue to learn and at the same time I'm trying to figure out writing I'm trying to figure out design.
So I'm baulking at programming.
It's so unforgiving. One little " out of place and KAPUT. This is so not right in my way of thinking.
But then is this the kind of thinking that leads to doom?
I'm thinking of the former general manager of Chile's Mint who lost his job after the Mint issued thousands of 50 peso coins with the name of the country spelt: C-H-I-I-E instead of CHILE.
