DES 680 Digital Design course covers topics related to design, innovation, and motion design. It discusses how the designer's role has changed with new technologies and how designers are uniquely positioned to lead innovation through intuition, experimentation, and empathy. Designers can use brand platforms and goal-directed design processes to create products and services that are useful, usable, and desirable. Motion design integrates skills from various fields to create graphic content for animation and video. Strategic designers excel at considering problems from different perspectives, controlling design processes, and scaling their abilities to tackle both small and large challenges.

1. DES 680 Digital Design
Designing Design
What Design Has Become

2. ● The world's economy, and the designer's role
within it, is radically changing.
● Effciency and aesthetics are no longer
enough.
● Companies and societies will continue to
prosper only if they push to higher grounds of
Innovation.

3. Innovation:
Imaginative activity fashioned to produce
outcomes that are both original and of practical
value.
* An activity designers naturally engage in!

4. Designers are uniquely positioned to lead
innovation, because they suggest that something
may be and reach out to explore it.
Designers are:
● INTUITIVE
● EXPERIMENTAL
● EMPATHETIC

5. A tool of innovation associated with design is
Brand Platform.
Brand Platform: the ideas, words, colors, textures,
sounds, animations, etc. from which later
decisions about a product or service may evolve.

6. www.nytimes.com

7. Connotation and Denotation in Design
Connotative:
Having the power of implying or suggesting
something in addition to what is explicit
Denotative:
Limited to the explicit meaning of a word or text; "a
literal translation"
Precisely and clearly expressed or readily
observable; leaving nothing to implication

8. Connotation and Denotation in Design
from The Language of Advertising http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist34/Unit_03/connotation.htm
A simple sign has a signifer which denotes its signifed; at the
second level of connotation, this whole sign becomes a signifer for
another signifed.
Components of advertisements typically have connotations, which
connect the advertisement to a larger cultural context.
For example, think about the way that hair is portrayed in
advertisements for hair products: either immaculately styled, or free-
fowing and in motion. The styled image is used in advertisements
that connote (a woman, typically) getting herself ready to socialize;
the free-fowing image connotes freedom in life: freedom from
worries about hair, freedom to travel, freedom of expression.

10. Motion Design from Designing for Motion by Matt Woolman
“The desktop computer has transformed the design profession
profoundly over the past 25 years. Distinct stages of evolution are
marked by points at which the once quaint profession of commercial
art, or graphic design, has grown into something more complex, as
the designer has expanded into new skill sets and areas of creative
practice.”
The eighties - print production processes, such as page layout,
typesetting, and mechanical preparation, move from the domain of
specialists working in these areas and onto the desktop of the
designer’s workspace.
The early nineties - an explosion of typeface design was the result of
consumer access to technology.

11. Motion Design from Designing for Motion by Matt Woolman
The mid-nineties - the designer gained access to the tools for
creating and producing Web sites and moving type.
The new wave - motion graphics, or motion design.
Behind this new wave lies yet another technological evolution.
Design studios now have access to highly advanced yet affordable
hardware and software literally on their desktops. Both 2-D and 3-D
animation and video production are now possible “inhouse,” rather
than in specialized—and expensive—shops.

12. Motion Design from Designing for Motion by Matt Woolman
Motion-graphics design is not a single discipline. It is a convergence
of animation, illustration, graphic design, narrative flmmaking,
sculpture, and architecture, to name only a few. The word “graphic” is
important: this includes formal content that has a graphic emphasis
such as symbols, icons, and illustrated 2- and 3-D objects, often
synthesized with live action.

13. Goal-Directed Design (the Interactive Design process)
Make people happy and your products & services will be a success.
BUT why are so many digital products so diffcult and unpleasant to
use? Why aren't we all happy and successful? Imbuing creation with
humanity. Pure technologically focused solutions tend to fail.
Human oriented design activities:
● Understanding audience/users' desires, needs, motivations and
contexts
● Understanding business and technical opportunities,
requirements, and constraints
● Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products
whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable, and
desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible.

14. The Goal-Directed Design Process
Design has become a limiting term in the technology industry. For many
developers and managers, the word has come to mean what happens in the third
process of the evolution of product design I.E. design provides a visual facelift ON
the implementation model (the representation of how a machine or program
actually works).
But design, when properly deployed both identifes user requirements and defnes
a detailed plan for the behavior and appearance of products – design provides
true PRODUCT DEFINITION.
Designers as researchers!
Current Model broken down into specialists
Market research Design of form
performed by performed by
market analysts graphic/UI and
and ethnographers industrial designers

15. The Goal-Directed Design Process
Designers should not be isolated from users or audience. Designers
bring to the table empathy. Additionally, it is often diffcult for pure
researchers to know what research information they've gathered is
really important from a design perspective.
GOALS, NOT FEATURES, ARE THE KEY TO PRODUCT SUCCESS
Marketers often describe a product or service based on its features
and/or functions. However, this only provides limited insight in to
how human beings can be effective and happy when viewing, using
or interacting with a product or service.

16. Characteristics of Strategic Designers
by Tom Klinkowstein
They are great Zoomers! The ability to engage in big picture thinking and yet still be details orientated
is what I like to call “Zooming”, and its people “Zoomers”. Strategic Designers have this ability to look at
situations or design problems from many different angles, think through different solutions, and fnally
reframe the answer at high and detailed levels. This reframing ability requires a lot of skill. The key
ingredient in reframing problems is the all-important ability to wear many hats and speak the many
different languages of business, marketing, design, engineering and manufacturing etc.
They know the design process like the back of their hand. Strategic Designers are experts of the
design process. They know it so well that they can “swim” in it, mould it and control it. The ability to have
ultimate control over the design process means that they can ensure that the strategic objectives are
achieved or at least maintained. Strategic Designers also know that in order to manage the chaos,
design can sometimes be a strong process is the key.
They are able to do everything. Being designers frst, they are able to do everything a designer can,
and perhaps more, because of their connection to the wider view and their ability to reframe. The
problem is that because of their focus in design strategy and management they do tend to get rusty, in
fact very rusty with the technical design stuff. Therefore it is very advisable for Strategic Designers to keep
that “designer in you” alive. Personal projects, constant sketching, running design programs are all ways
strategic designers use to keep in touch with things.

17. Characteristics of Strategic Designers
by Tom Klinkowstein
They also know that they don’t have to do everything. Strategic Designers know the value of a good
team and great teamwork. They also know when to let go and try not to do everything. Letting go is the
hardest, but they know where their value lies and when they can add this value in the design process.
There is “no job too big or too small”. The interesting thing about Strategic Designers is that their
ability is scalable. No problem too big or too small. Strategic Design can be about the smallest thing
and also about the biggest. You don’t have to be running multi-million dollar programs to be strategic;
you can also be strategic with small meaningful solutions. Strategic design is about an approach or a
process of design. Like any process once you get it right it can applicable on many levels and in many
situations.

18. References:
About Face 3 The Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin, Wiley Publishing |
IN, 2007
Tom Klinkowstein, Notes on “What Design Has Become” & “Characteristics of a Strategic Designer”
The Language of Advertising http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist34/Unit_03/connotation.htm