Design Influences

Systems

Web Communications 2020

Collectively, we are all attempting to navigate systems of power, an interconnected and interdependent web of relationships, as we try to learn how to communicate effectively with each other.

Principles

Ontological Design

A design discipline concerned with designing human experience. Through the designing of physical spaces, digital technologies, and social experiences in parallel, we are in fact designing for states of being.

Processes

Speculative Design

It’s this notion of creating the medium or inventing the medium. Emergent media art is what we’re doing as we’re inventing the media that we are using with that technology as a substrate or base.

Systems

Design Science Studio

An educational incubator for art inspired by a regenerative future that works for 100% of life.

Processes

Network

Power comes from the network. Our evolutionary advantage is our ability to collaborate and cooperate. Change is coming whether you like it or not.

Processes

Finding Solutions

You could say that the job of a designer is to know where to find things and use the right tools, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you design something.

Ethics

The Role of a Designer

Designers hold the office of priests in our culture. In the days of the pharaohs and kings, the priests had the magical ability to read and write. Literacy was a closely guarded secret of the intelligentsia and the elites in the courts of the ancient monarchs.

Projects

Making Your Case

Once you recognize the challenge you are facing to find work as a designer by turning your job search into a design challenge, you will want to begin building your reputation as a designer. Your career begins with the way you represent your work to the world.

Systems

Opportunity

The Great Reset is as an opportunity to reimagine our social architecture. In that sense, every human being on this planet is a designer as we explore how we imagine, design, and build the future together. We are a planetary builders collective, building leaders to design a resilient society.

Designers

Chris Do

Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, director, CEO and Chief Strategist of Blind and the founder of The Futur—an online education platform with the mission of teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love.

Ethics

Reckoning

Radical changes are required within our social, economic, and political systems that can be the legacy that we leave to the next generation: organizational biomimicry that more efficiently uses resources while understanding the biological and ecological limits of capitalist consumption.

Designers

Frida Medrano

I’m a type and digital designer interested in combining technology and design. I’ve worked on projects about variable fonts like my typeface Jabin, and an investigation of how to streamline content between print and web.

Processes

Challenge

If you are taking your first steps in a career shift, the greatest problem to overcome is a lack of experience in a job market that may be training a surplus of designers to compete for a scarce number of available design positions. First, reframe your job search as a design challenge.

Ethics

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Designer

Why am I making this such a big deal? Because it is on the same level of deciding whether we will side with the Nazis or not. If we ever wanted to know what we would do in that situation, well, we are deciding right now.

Designers

Erika Hall

Erika Hall is the co-founder and Director of Strategy at Mule Design and the author of Just Enough Research. Her consulting practice focuses on helping organizations make better, more evidence-based decisions.

Designers

Mimi Nishiguchi

Mimi’s studies in psychology during her undergraduate years contributed to her belief that the mind and body are interconnected. She incorporates this holistic approach to design by practicing intent and making every interaction count.

Designers

Thoko Phiri

When I was working with Thoko as a mentor for UX Academy at Designlab, one of the case study prompts was a responsive web design for a revival of the Pan Am Airlines brand. I suggested that she use the Lilium Jet as inspiration.

Designers

Jonas Downey

Jonas Downey turned his job search into a design challenge. He got the job when he demonstrated his strategic persistence to determine his path in life by proving his ability to solve problems and improve his skills in order to apply again, months after he applied the first time.

Designers

Aleks Popov

Aleks Popov’s UX design case study, Inhale, was spotlighted on the Career Karma website. The case study was rated best project of the month.

Projects

Resilience Through Design

Can the changes we are experiencing provide opportunities to rethink what we value? How might designers contribute to the redesign of our public and private services as we look ahead to recover from the pandemic?

Systems

Building a Design Community

For several years, I have been hoping to build a design community to engage in conversations about the value of design and collaborative projects for meeting the challenges of building complex social systems.

Processes

The Science of Creativity

User experience design is the science of creativity. We have applied the scientific method—hypothesis, experiment, test, repeat—to the study of human behaviour, so that we can design usable product designs. We use different terms: define, prototype, test, iterate.

Ethics

Inspired by the past. Shaping the future.

The words “design influences” can be understood as both a plural noun and as subject and verb. The plural noun speaks of those who have come before us and paved the way. The verb speaks of the responsibility of design to lead the way.

Designers

Whitney Martin

Product design has enabled Whitney Martin to bring her documentary approach—raising the awareness and value of other people’s experiences—to the iterative process of design, inspiring a dynamic environment of inclusivity and collaboration.

Designers

Jessica Hische

Jessica Hische grew up in Pennsylvania. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she works as a letterer, illustrator, type designer, and relentless procrastiworker.