Pat’s Point of View

I’m currently reading both Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and Ann Jordan’s Business Anthropology (thanks for the tip Ash).

Great books, but I’m getting a little concerned. It’s dawning on me that I’m not a very good designer. That’s design as in coming up with a solution to a known problem, not any particular field of design such as fashion or interior design. This is a little odd considering what I do involves quite a bit of design: technical design, graphic design, information design, solution design, high-level design. I wouldn’t say I’m bad at it, but it doesn’t make me happy. Don’t get me wrong, I very much appreciate good design and will usually place it above other criteria. So as a consumer of design, there’s no problem. I find the actual act of designing very frustrating and it doesn’t produce a great deal of joy—even when I get it ‘right’.

I’m much more of the analytical type; thoroughly introspective (eg this post). I’m more at ease observing and analysing then acting on motivations. I’ve always thought of myself as ‘the great observer’, quietly watching everything that goes on and making sense of all that information. Which is a likely explanation for why ethnographic research comes naturally to me, and the design of solutions to problems I observe, does not.

These are things I think I have always known, but am only just now recognising for what they are. Or perhaps it’s a case of admitting the truth. I do have a creative side (writing, drawing etc) but even that has an observational or descriptive tendency. I can draw something I see but would find it difficult to create something new from scratch.

With all of this in mind, I’m much more interested than ever in psychology and anthropology, and I hope to study in these areas at some stage. This is fairly distant from what I wanted to study (industrial design) and rather a long way off what I ended up studying (computer engineering). I guess it’s better late than never.

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