designer salary
I have been always curious about whether designers earn as much as business people. See below.
See the coroflot’s 2009 designer salary survey
Interestingly, conclusion No. 3 suggests that design academics is not a smart choice. Is this true? Hope to see a meaningful conclusion based on more data.
One of the “deciders” for the World’s Best Design Schools in Business Week
As one of the 42 panelists, I participate in listing the World’s Best Design Schools in Business Week.
Please find the World’s Best Design Schools and the panelists.
NSF Design Series Workshop, “Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Workshop: Instruction” (1)
In two days, I join a group of esteemed design teachers working at a variety of schools. They come from mechanical engineering and engineering education to architecture and psychology. I am one of few people with business background.
Although the information about participants and design courses are available on the workshop website at Stanford, a summarized list might be of some help to those who need those information right now.
Biographical sketches of participants
The collected design courses (probably, this is the only document in the world on this issue!)
Designers’ theme
We, consumers, do not know well how good a holistic object created by designers is. One example of this hard-to-evaluate, holistic object is room interior, which consists of furniture, clocks, wall decoration, and so on.
Typically, consumers are recommended to break down a holistic object into a list of components when they need to evaluate it because doing so helps them understand how important each component is for evaluating the whole object. For instance, if they find the importance of each interior component, then they are able to evaluate a room interior.
Therefore, “learning” is proposed to be important. It is argued that, for instance, when consumers are exposed to multiple rooms with ther evaluation scores and the interior components, they learn the importance of interior components and, they are able to evaluate other rooms. In sum, “breaking down holistic objects” benefits consumers.
However, I believe that consumers can benefit from an opposite approach, so called, “Putting together analytic components.” Why? I find that when holistic objects are designed, designers tend to make a theme in advance. Although it is not easy for typical consumers to identify a theme, if this theme is identified, consumers would be able to evaluate holistic objects more objectively without necessarily breaking them down into pieces.
For instance, when designers design a room, they generally set up a theme and then choose approrpriate interior components. If they go for a theme of “jungle,” they may choose brown desks and green chairs to represent “trees,” paint walls with red dots to represent “bugs,” and place a round-shaped yellow clock on the wall to represent “the sun.”
Themes explain why designers choose specific shapes, colors, and places for each interior component. Then, a critical question is whether consumers identify the designer’s theme when they see a room interior? Put differently, can consumers reversely engineer designer’s message? If not, how can we help consumers find the designer’s theme?
“Play” with diabetes
Half an year ago, a friend of mine approached me and asked me if I am interested in joining her submitting a work to a design contest, 2009 DiabetesMine™ Design Challenge. It was an online competition about new tools for improving life with diabetes. I answered ‘why not?’ and had several times of discussions with her and another designer friend.
First of all, it was fun to work with two professional designers. They constantly pumped out interesting and wacky ideas. I was impressed by the amount of effort they invested and the quality of the final outcome.
What did I learn from this experience? “Business people talk a lot, but designers make a lot.”
Curiosity-evoking product design?
Some products serve surprising functions with unexpected forms. For instance, a new product launched from 3M looks like a doughnut but works as a tape dispenser. It can be divided into two parts and combined with differently colored parts such as chocolate-brown, strawberry-red, and cream-white. There is a cell-phone shaped lighter which lights up the fire when its slide opens. There is also a wine shpaed umbrella. A small umbrella can be carried by a wine-bottle shaped container.
Why do some people like these products? Do the shapes of these products make people curious about their functions? Or, does no one like these products?
Different design consulting firms, different approaches
I wonder if design consulting firms use different approaches (e.g., different research methods, different ways of data usage, different ways of idea generation, etc.). If so, why and when different approaches are used? I believe this is an important question that needs to be answered because, for now, there is no guidance that (non-design) managers use when they look for which design consulting firms they need to contact initially. (IDEO may not always available, isn’t it? 
)
Imagine that a hospital manager wants to make the experience of the patients better in his hospital. Then, the designers from a design consulting firm uses one type of market research (e.g., interview rather than survey), collect one type of data (e.g., “Parking lot is dirty” rather than “nurses are not friendly”), and suggest one type of solutions (e.g., “cleaning up the parking space” rather than “educating nurses”). This sequence of design activity shows that even before designers identify problems (data) and generate solutions (ideas), the initial moment of the design process (e.g., choice of research methods) determines the overall design process. Therefore, I believe, if the pattern of the design outcome of each design consulting firm, we might be able to tell which consulting firm fits which projects, which will be of great help to managers to find their right consultants!
NSF Design Series Workshop, “Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Workshop: Instruction”
I am invited to participate in the NSF Design Series Workshop, “Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Workshop: Instruction”, on August 28 – 29 at the d-school at Stanford University.
This is the fourth of the Interdisciplinary Graudate Design Workshop Series. The first one was about “the Design Discipline“ (@ University of Michigan, November 2008). The second one was about “Spanning Design Boundaries” (@ Northwestern University, April 2009). The third one was about “Research Challenges” (@ Honolulu, June 2009).
This is an amazing opportunity to take a glimpse of where designers want to go!
Do consumers like simple-forms?
I want to share my journey to understand whether people like simple forms or not. This is an interesting research topic because we can find many simple products designed by Naoto Fukasawa, and we also have two great thinkers who do not seem to completely agree with each other about the same issue: John Maeda and Don Norman.
First, I hypothesize that consumers prefer simple forms over complex forms because simple forms provide some cognitive gains (e.g., easy to use or performing better) than complex forms. I further hypothesize that (1) people prefer simple forms when less informative forms are eliminated (e.g., play button on the mp3 player) and that (2) they do not prefer simple forms when highly informative forms (e.g., base control button on the mp3 player) are eliminated.
I conducted one pilot study and two experimental studies.
The pilot study showed that subjects preferred simple forms over complex forms (BBQ grill and Portable speaker).
Study 1 also showed that subjects preferred simplified forms over the original complex forms (computer mouse, usb drive, humidifier, and portable stereo). Interestingly, although they were provided with the identical functional description about each product, they answered that the performance of the simple forms would be better than the performance of the complex forms.
Finally, study 2 showed that subjects preferred simple forms only when less informative buttons were eliminated. When highly informative buttons were eliminated (Q-sound, T-base, and song translation), subjects did NOT prefer simple forms over complex forms. However, when less diangostic buttons were eliminated (play, rewind, and forward buttons), subjects preferred simple forms over complex forms.
In sum, studies showed that consumers prefer simple forms over complex forms and that one cause of the simple form preference is cognitive gain.
Hypothesis-driven thinking
Jeanne Liedtka @ U of Toronto
Jeanne Liedtka, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business, visited University of Toronto and presented her work on growth. She argues that “catalysts” succeed against odds because they (1) have a broad repertoire (e.g., cross-functionally trained), (2) have a learning mindset, and have an empathy.
What was interesting in her talk was to compare between growth mindset business people (based on hypothesis-driven thinking) and fixed mindset business people.
- When people have a growth mindset, they consider life as a journey of learning, embrace uncertainty, seek new experience, broaden repertoire, manage risks through action, place small bets quickly (i.e., rapid prototyping), and thus succeed more often in new situations.
- When people have a fixed mindset, they consider life as a test to avoid mistake, fear uncertainty, avoid new experience, narrow repertore, fail to manage risks without action, place large bets slowly, and thus fail more often in new situations.
She emphasized that “learning” is important when people make failures. “Learning people” learn from their failures because failures are opportunity for them to test their hypotheses, whereas “non-learning people” do not have the same chance.
I am very much with her in that life-long learning with hypothesis-driven thinking is essential to succeed in ANY domain, let alone design and new product development.
So far, I have met only two academically sound literature on the topic of design thinking or how designers think. One is abductive thinking suggested by Nigel Cross and the other is this: hypothesis-driven thinking. If there is any other thought about how designers think, hope to talk more.
