Earlier this week I stumbled across this post by designer Aral Balkan. The bulk of the post is about terminal application theming in GNOME, which I suppose I have some vested interest in as both a user of command line interfaces and of GNOME…but not nearly enough interest to read 2500+ words on the subject. What I did find interesting enough to both read about and to watch the embedded 49 minute talk was his take on design. It centers around the idea that design isn’t about solving a problem, it’s about knowing which problem to solve.
This framing was novel to me and helped me understand some “whys” a little better - like why_ my microwave has so damn many buttons_. Similar to Balkan’s washing machine example, I now suspect that it’s because the microwave designer was thinking about the problem of “how to heat food” and not the problem of “bringing food to an acceptable temperature for consumption”, which are almost the same thing but subtly different in important ways.
As a bit of a side note: it’s now abundantly clear to me that the microwave designer also didn’t consider designing it in such a way that it wouldn’t become disgusting inside and out after 1-3 uses. I’m not claiming to know how to solve this problem - I’m not in the business of designing microwaves - but what I ca n tell you is that I own other objects that I can touch without them immediately looking like they’ve been finger-painted with grease. Furthermore, if you have to buy an aftermarket part in order to prevent a single ordinary use from rendering the thing utterly filthy then perhaps some design considerations were left on the table.
But I digress.
The talk is a bit on the long side, but it’s worth watching. …and on an inDay, no less!
Enjoy.