I recently gave a Pecha Kucha talk on 'Designing beyond the visual' at TechMeetup Glasgow with Jamie Sunderland. http://techmeetup.co.uk/

1. Designing beyond the visual
Duane Harrison
Jamie Sunderland
Hi this is Duane and Jamie. We are final year Product Design students at the Glasgow School
of Art. We just wanted to share a few thoughts today about how we design and how it can
applied holistically.
Friday, 10 May 2013

2. There is someone missing today. That’s Reynan on the right hand side. He’s currently doing
an internship at i.labs in Tokyo. We have begun to work together to solve bigger problems.
Between us we have worked in start-ups, technology companies and research labs.
Friday, 10 May 2013

3. Are designers
sharing?
These are four statements by Anab Jain, director of London based design consultancy
Superflux. We very much agree with them, in particular the fourth one. We believe there is
an increased importance of the collective wisdom rather than individual knowledge.
Friday, 10 May 2013

4. This is a nice example of how designers might share currently -
Before going on exchange to Japan I followed designers and design researchers. One of
them reached out to me first and later that year, I met her and her colleagues. It was a great
introduction to many other designer researchers in Japan.
Friday, 10 May 2013

5. Our connected world allows us to share things of interest and surprise. We set up a simple
group Design Share. The mix of students and industry professionals are from different
countries and disciplines. It delivers great articles and content which we normally wouldn’t
come across.
Friday, 10 May 2013

6. Design Share Meet up 2013, Cologne
And Design Share was recently taken into the real world with our first meet up in Colonge
earlier this year. We went deeper into discussing new ideas about design and the future of
designs application across various industries.
Friday, 10 May 2013

7. We set up a collaborative blog to share different types of creative processes that have been
applied to design and research projects. The processes stretch from the simple use of
questions to bigger ways to prototype systems. We are excited to publish a selection of these
processes in a publication this summer. Get in touch at processindex.wordpress.com
Friday, 10 May 2013

8. One of the processes is the 80/20 rule. Used as a way to plan and prioritise before diving into
tasks; defining the 20% that can give the 80% return can prove of value to shorter time lines
and quick tests. This process might be familiar to engineers as it has been mentioned by
Microsoft. The focus of task is increasingly tough an information overload culture.
Friday, 10 May 2013

9. What are we going
to learn this week?
Another process we apply is questioning what we can learn this week. By giving a learning
outcome of the week it is easier to measure what can often be intangible. This is particularly
important for start ups where information and insight from learning is often more valuable
than money. Instagram is a prime example of this as they finish in the bar on Friday to test.
Friday, 10 May 2013

10. So how can we learning more? Seth regularly describes the art of shipping and “getting it
out of the door to put in front of someone to criticise”. Getting hung up on aesthetics at the
early phase of projects is dangerous. We can only learn through shipping to those people
who might use it rather than by creating assumptions ourselves.
Friday, 10 May 2013

11. Time management has been a focus of our recent project work, collaborating with a software
engineer from the University of Glasgow. We questioned how time management could be
designed not to feel like management. Sessions lets users pledge target time for a certain
activity. With it, one can track time spent on a certain activity over a period of time.
Friday, 10 May 2013

12. How can we brainstorm better?
We also questioned brainstorming. This image, in my previous experience, is a typical result
of brainstorming. It is usually done on paper, and we never usually go back to it. We started
to wonder"How can we brainstorm better?"
Friday, 10 May 2013

13. This is the current outcome of the project. The initial idea was around circular, map-like
structure which encourages consideration from all angles. But a great byproduct of this is
that it almost forces the creation of more ideas as the space for ideas expands.
Friday, 10 May 2013

14. Sharing the book
Do people
share books?
However, we still believe the physical books are an unbeatable medium to trigger new
conversations and develop trust over information. We recently experienced the power of this
introducing service design using a book with a contact in a separate industry. From this they
could now question a lot more things related to customers and employees experiences.
Friday, 10 May 2013

15. But is there opportunity to open up peoples bookshelves further to wider localise audiences?
The surge of a shared economies proposes a different kind of consumption. Despite this
Flickr screenshot and the user annotating their books.. it seems a bit of waste to have these
idle local bookshelves that other people could enjoy and create new conversations with.
Friday, 10 May 2013

16. Twitter is a great example of questioning the conventional ways and applying existing
knowledge and behaviours into other contexts. What originated from Jack Dorsey’s
fascination with the emergency services short communication as a teenage grew into a
global public infrastructure that has opened up the world to other levels of liberation.
Friday, 10 May 2013

17. When Jack first had insight into the way that the emergency services communicated and
shared their location he would never have imagined a service like Twitter. It was his ability to
connect the dots looking back and timing in an age where everyone owns a mobile that
service like Twitter seems viable.
Friday, 10 May 2013

18. PROJECT SIZE
PROJECT RANGE
INFRASTRUCTURE
SOPHISTICATION
Of course, it is very difficult to discover and answer these questions. So are starting small,
with the examples of the app and brainstorming and shared libraries. But we aim for each
project to get bigger and hope our learning, capabilities and reach will grow too.
Friday, 10 May 2013

19. What we can do now is to ask these big questions now and record them. It is of our interest to
connect the dots looking back when the timing is right, when societal and technological
advancements occur. We hope that in the future, by having developed better capabilities and
by working with people smarter than us, we will be able to answer these bigger questions.
Friday, 10 May 2013

20. designforwards.com
@duaneharrison
@jamiesunderland
Friday, 10 May 2013