Analysis of the evolution of design: Design

The National Museum of China has a permanent topic. It is a design exhibition in the expansion and Expansion Project. In this exhibition, ten shortlisted schemes were displayed, and several modifications and final drafts were made in the future, finally forming today's National Museum. The bidding scheme is displayed independently to show the design sense close to art. It is not a patent of the construction industry. Think of the 25th anniversary of Pixar Animation, which was previously watched in Shanghai, from drafts, models, experimental short films to "artistic scenery" film and television, the design evolution process itself, fascinating.

Yesterday I went back to "design original". Although I started from the computer engineering field, I was inspired by the design induction and description. The so-called craftsman spirit is the sense of pursuit of excellence in design. Art, music, IT, and commerce. Combined with the outlook of my career, it also seems to be accessible. During the three-day holiday, I vaguely figured out some things. Here we will sort out a summary of the dehydration edition to review the fragments that hit the soul.

　　1. Requirements

If the requirements are formulated in the form of a committee, they are inevitably driven by their nature and tend to over-develop products. Perhaps the specification led by the Committee is the culprit behind the high-size and ambitious Disaster Tolerance of software systems.

Taking demand creep as a top priority is the most effective way to deal with it. Early appointment of strong, experienced, and field knowledge managers, and require them to participate in the entire initial system delivery period. Authorize them to "customize standard processes and steps in the way they think necessary ".

　　2. About collaboration

To grasp the explosive growth complexity of any engineering field, you have to rely on specialization. The team design has become a modern standard, and the danger is that the product has lost its conceptual integrity.

Collaboration costs include splitting costs (defining the interfaces between subtasks in a concise and accurate manner means a lot of work and a lot of risks), learning and teaching cost, communication cost, change control (including negotiation with the design of other affected parts ).

(Multi-person) Collaboration advantages: Determine stakeholder needs, establish goals, concept exploration, design review (the most valuable design phase of collaboration; experts in each subject must review the design documents separately; the most important auxiliary means is the normal model of the product ).

After the basic theme is selected in the exploration phase, the next step is the rule time of conceptual integrity. The design comes from a primary designer, supported by the design team, rather than being broken down. (However, a team of two is a special case. Even in the conceptual design phase, when conceptual integrity is the most valuable, the concerted efforts of a pair of designers can be more effective than a single designer ).

The most successful remote collaboration I know is based on a large number of face-to-face communication history.

It is difficult to define clean interfaces between components remotely designed. This is not the end of definition. It turns out that it is necessary to continuously answer questions and interpret the definition semantics. In addition, the management should design a pre-determined mechanism to solve the difference in opinion or taste.

　　3. Trial and error

Experienced people believe that humans will inevitably make mistakes. Such a firm belief in errors has produced such a design methodology, it includes design, early prototyping, early user testing, iterative incremental implementation, testing using a large number of test cases, and regression testing after changes. I am a hardcore experiencer, and the program runs correctly as soon as it comes up and is expected to run this kind of thing only twice in a lifetime.

Clear assumptions are better than vague ones even if they are wrong. Incorrect assumptions may at least be challenged, but vague ones will not.

　　4. Constraints

To ensure the design quality, especially the conceptual integrity of the team design, you should specify scarce resources, publicly track and strictly control them. Each group and each team member must know how much they can control. No matter how many critical resources are available, team leaders need to reserve some resources for subsequent allocation.

Constraints reduce the exploration space of designers. In this way, they will focus more on and speed up the design process. They also challenge designers, which often helps stimulate new creations.

Experienced designers may find that they follow the constraints of their habits, but as technology continues to grow, these habits may no longer apply.

Any design process begins with a detailed description and concrete description of the Goals and constraints of the designer.

　　5. Style

What is logical beauty: simple, clear structure, and consistency

How to get a good style: Learn the style of other designers purposefully (forcing you to think carefully about the details and clarify your ideas) make conscious judgments (write comments and reasons for your favorite style), exercises, and corrections.

The template provides a safe model for the new design, an implicit check list for the design task, and warnings for potential errors. It can also serve as the starting point of the new design.

In traditional design principles, amateur designers and trained professionals use templates in a very different way. Amateurs will use the templates they have seen in their own experiences. The range of professional players is much larger: the entire model library reflects different times, different styles, and different schools of thought. In this way, he will be able to get expert-level guidance from these model libraries, and the teacher will focus on the characteristics worth attention and illustrate their differences.

Most technical documents emphasize what, but ignore why ). Many designers have never been clear about their design, and the creators are busy with the subsequent design.

Amateur players in any field will make a lot of small mistakes, and professional players will never make these mistakes. Training, internships, and practices will improve the skills of professional players.

Consider the assumptions about your design goals and the surrounding environment from the upper layer. Is your hypothesis valid ten years later?

Separation of design and use/implementation, remedy: User Experience (even a small amount of user experience is better than none), incremental design and Incremental delivery, concurrent engineering (pushing implementation forward to the design process, allowing real-time practitioners to actively participate in the design process), designer Education (direct user access and implementation experience ).

　　6. About designers

If designers want to learn the most from each design experience, they need to record the design evolution process: not only what the design is, but also why the design is like this.

The standard company's product design process does impede a truly superior and innovative design. If the product process is designed for a follow-up product, this is also appropriate. For innovation, people must jump beyond the process.

Designer training: drawing design drafts constantly (designers learn design through design) seek knowledge to criticize your design, study examples, and set a precedent (you can imitate many excellent designers; when studying the precedent, the key is to be aware of the Goals and constraints of the designer. "What caused a smart design to do this? "; Listen to how contemporary designers discuss their work and read the words written by designers for their work. Recommended reading: Interpreting 40 excellent interface designs ).

Career planning: when a young German Scholar starts his career, he usually chooses 3 or 4 fields of true interest, these fields are all concentrated in his Topic Center. He will write several sets of courses for these fields, strengthen and enrich each group of courses until a book is formed. If he has enough energy and understanding, he will become the author of 3 or 4 books. Then he will continue to expand each field year after year, until he accumulates the real authoritative knowledge of the entire topic.

Analysis of the evolution of design: Design