The Miami Design Collaborative, which officially started in January 2009, has been assigned it’s first official home on the campus of Miami University. Thanks to the generosity of the School of Fine Arts and Dean Jim Lentini, we’ll have space in Hiestand Hall, in collaboration with the Hiestand Galleries. The brainstorming/conferencing room will be a great meeting place for students, grad students and faculty. If you’re on campus, please come by and check us out at 114 Hiestand Hall.

In addition to this exciting news, we’re working on a design thinking certificate program, hopefully to be offered starting in Fall 2010. The certificate will be for students interested in gaining knowledge and a level of expertise in design process and collaborative problem-solving. Be looking for more information, as we will begin publicizing the program for registration once it’s approved. This diagram describes the program:

The Designer’s Guide to Business and Careers: How to Succeed on the Job or on Your Own has the tools designers need to get their careers off to strong starts – and maintain them for the long haul.

Peg Faimon, a Miami University professor of graphic design, director of the Miami Design Collaborative, and co-director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, authored the book to help people who are just getting started in the business.

“The audience for the book includes designers who are preparing for the transition into the working world, young professionals, and those who are trying to build a freelance business, or are starting their own firm,” Faimon said. “The book gives real-world advice from successful designers and has an interactive format.”

Readers of the book will learn how to:

• Research different career paths in design and organize a job search
• Craft an effective portfolio and master interview techniques to land the right job
• Maintain a professional image and network to ensure a consistent stream of paying projects
• Collaborate effectively with clients, other designers and experts in other professions
• Establish a freelance business, develop an in-house career or kick start a firm
• Stay fresh and move forward in the ever-changing world of graphic design

Faimon’s book is published by F+W Media’s HOW Design Books. Faimon maintains a design consultancy and has received national and international recognition for her design work, and was named the Naus Family Faculty Scholar in 2008. Faimon also is the author and designer of Design Allliance and the co-author, with John Weigand, of The Nature of Design, both published in 2003 by HOW Design Books.

The Designer’s Guide to Business and Careers can be found on Amazon.

by Scott Johnston, Director
Energy and Sustainable Design Studio of the Miami Design Collaborative

The first building codes adopted in the 70’s called for increased efficiency in the envelope, and the building mechanical and electrical systems.  Over the years the earlier codes were revised to call for higher levels of efficiency in the design and operations of buildings.  As we try to understand what it means to design truly sustainable buildings, it’s becoming apparent that simply increasing efficiency is, as William McDonough says, “just being less bad.”

Ultimately the sustainable buildings of the future will need to be not just more efficient, but more energy neutral. To this end a new generation of hybrid building envelope systems will need to be developed that can balance the hourly energy flows through the skin and from orientation to orientation for each season of the year.

Over the last four years students and faculty researchers at Miami University have been exploring a range of ideas for hybrid wall systems designed to moderate the energy flows at the wall line. Working as consultants for local building owners, architects, engineers, and building product manufacturers, a number of hybrid envelope design strategies have been studied including the following.

•    Modular selective transmission window designs
•    Thermal lag spandrel panels
•    Thin section phase change glazing tiles
•    Low cost operable interior light shelves
•    Offset fretted grazing (on the 2 and 3 faces) for seasonally variable shading coefficients
•    Glazing integrated PV driven window wall ventilation

Image via CrunchBase

“Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google,” a May 9 NY Times article by Miguel Helft, debates the place of customers/users in the design process, especially as it relates to decision-making and innovation. Helft asks, “CAN a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want? These questions surfaced recently when Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google…Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data….Google is unapologetic about its approach. ‘We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,’ Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search products and user experience, said in a recent television interview.”

The world of interactive media offers designers an amazing and unprecedented environment for testing their ideas. A designer can easily create one or many ideas, put them up, and have users interact with them, choose their favorite, and offer valuable feedback. This process can be repeated until a design is refined and the designer has loads of data to help sell their idea to their client. But the “crowd-sourcing” approach to design can have its downsides and limitations.

“‘Getting virtually real-time feedback from users is incredibly powerful,’ said Debra Dunn, an associate professor at the Stanford Institute of Design. ‘But the feedback is not very rich in terms of the flavor, the texture and the nuance, which I think is a legitimate gripe among many designers.’

Adhering too rigidly to a design philosophy guided by ‘Web analytics,’ Ms. Dunn said, ‘makes it very difficult to take bold leaps.’

And as much as it may sound jarring, the customer is not always right.

‘Customers sometimes do not know what they want,’ said John Seely Brown, the co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, a research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. ‘It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need.’

None of this means that input from users is unimportant. Indeed, Ms. Dunn, Mr. Brown and others say designers must find a multitude of ways to understand users’ needs at a deeper level.

‘It is more from engaging with users, watching what they do, understanding their pain points, that you get big leaps in design,’ Ms. Dunn said.”

MiamiDesign200 symposium on creativity, design and innovation took place on April 15 and 16. This event was a unique collaboration between academic programs and organizations on campus – the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, the Performing Arts Series, and the Miami Design Collaborative.

This key Miami Bicentennial Celebration event featured Philip Glass in solo piano performance. During the symposium, Glass also presented “Creativity and Collaboration,” honing in on the idea of creativity and how disparate artists, educators and students can inspire each other and how their collaborative work can be satisfying – perhaps more satisfying than working alone. Glass was joined by leaders in design practice, including Sandy Speicher from IDEO’s Transformation practice; Rick Mariani, Senior Creative Director for Interbrand; and Shane Meeker, Associate Design Fellow at Procter & Gamble.

A student team from the Departments of Art and Architecture & Interior Design placed 10th in the Food for Thought International Idea competition 2009. More than 100 entries were submitted representing 26 different countries and 63 different cities.

The competition was sponsored by the 24/7 Sandwichshop and asked contestants to design an eating facility challenging people to think differently about food – how we get it and how we consume it.

Five Miami groups, led by faculty Samantha Perkins and Mary Ben Bonham, submitted entries. Members of the winning team, who developed a proposal for a restaurant chain, “Not Dogs,” include:

• Chris George, a junior graphic design major, interactive media studies minor from Rocky River;
• Corkum Steffel, a senior graphic design major, interactive media studies minor from Battle Creek, Mich.;
• Erica Sillin, a junior graphic design major, interactive media studies minor from Dayton;
• Rachael Baldwin, a junior graphic design major, interactive media studies minor from Perrysburg;
• Laura Wales, a senior architecture major, interactive media studies minor from Chester, N.J.; and
• Molly Miller, a junior interior design major from Overland Park, Kan.

The judges praised the design for its completeness, including packaging, name, presentation and brand.

Image by Night Owl City via Flickr

According to the Universal Design Alliance web site (www.universaldesign.org), universal design (UD) is defined as: “The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without adaptation or specialized design. A user-friendly approach to design in the living environment where people of any culture, age, size, weight, race, gender and ability can experience an environment that promotes their health, safety and welfare today and in the future.”

One of the key misconceptions about universal design is that it is “design for the disabled” as outlined in the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) guidelines. This isn’t a true interpretation of the intent and philosophy behind universal design. Yes, this approach should result in design solutions of all sorts (architecture, print, web, products) that are more accessible to people with disabilities, but many times designers incorrectly interpret this as a narrow slice of the population. It’s important to realize that almost everyone will have a disability of one type or another at some point in his life. Designers should be considering a large audience when approaching design from a universal perspective.

In most instances, when a design is considered from a universal perspective, it improves the design and functionality for everyone. Take doorknobs for instance. A design that doesn’t require you to grasp the knob and turn, but just push down, will work for someone without hands, for someone whose hands are injured and for someone who has their hands full of books. This solution has improved functionality for a wide range of needs and situations. Universal design should benefit as many people as possible no matter their age, size or ability.

Look around the various environments you find yourself in—home, office, stores, airports, etc. Consider interacting with those same spaces if you were a different size, of different abilities or from a different culture. How would it change things? What would make life easier or more difficult?

I just returned from Berlin, Germany where I was attending the International Conference on Design Principles and Practices. It was a fascinating conference with a wide variety of presentations and speakers from around the world.

Susan Ewing, Associate Dean of the School of Fine Arts and Distinguished Professor of Art; Michael Bailey-Van Kuren, Associate Professor of Engineering; Glenn Platt, Director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies and Professor of Marketing; and I presented “Transformation through Collaboration.” This 60-minute workshop focused on taking the participants through a mini-version of the curriculum design exercise we went through last fall to create the Miami Design Collaborative. We discussed the IDEO deep dive process and then had groups of four-five persons brainstorm new curricular concepts for their institutions.

As part of the process we also discussed barriers to curricular reform. The participants were from countries as diverse as Eqypt, England, Japan and the US, but it was incredible how similar everyone’s issues were. We are all struggling with very similar problems, many of which surround the traditional structure of the university. The design disciplines throughout the world are seeing a increasing need for connectedness and diversity of approach, as well as an interest in collaborating with a variety of fields, including business, engineering, psychology, etc.

We also attended many inspiring presentations. I’ll discuss those in my next post. P.