This document provides principles for product designers to consider in their work. It discusses the importance of materials, craft, people and business in design. It emphasizes practicing design skills, collaborating with others, understanding user needs and making designs that can be successfully built and sold. The document also notes the importance of constraints, iteration and managing complexity when bringing products to market.

1. Principles for the Working
Product Designer
PDX UX, November 6, 2014
@chrisrivard
clearwired@gmail.com

2. 1. Materials
2. Craft
3. People
4. Business
5. The Design Problem

3. Materials

4. Industrial Design
Silicon
Anodized aluminium
Stainless steel
Glass

6. Musical Composition
Rhythm
Melody
Key
Scale
Consonance & Dissonance

7. Clint Mansell
Leaving Earth or First Snow (The Fountain, Black Swan, Moon, ME3)
Hans Zimmer
Jisas Yu Holem Hand Blong Mi (Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life)
Philip Glass
Koyannisqatsi, Pruit Igoe & Prophecies (Koyannisqatsi, Watchmen)

8. “The author is not inclined to the
sanguine belief that such a subtle
and imaginative art as that of
composition can be acquired by
those not possessed of the innate
faculty, by simply studying from
books.”
- Percy Goetschius, Material Used in Musical Composition, 1913

9. Writing (prose)
Corbett and Conners, Style and Statement
Antimetabole (repetition of words)
Chiasmus (reversal of structure)
Synecdoche (part for the whole)
Metonymy (substitution of attribution)

10. The Classic Style
Elegant
Efficient
Unadorned
Truthful
Confident
Conversational (single reader vs. group)

11. “Every country possesses, it seems,
the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is
to say the sort of cuisine it is
appreciative enough to want.”
“It is the destiny of mint to be crushed.”
- The Food of France, Waverly Root

12. Design posture
The nonfiction essay
Conversational
Looks easy

13. Fashion and digital design
The business of design
Language constrains the way we talk about design (design critique).

14. “One of the surest of tests is the
way in which a poet borrows.
Immature poets imitate; mature
poets steal; bad poets deface
what they take, and good poets
make it into something better, or
at least something different.”
- T.S. Eliot

15. Passive (cognitive)
vs.
Interactive (cognitive + physical)

16. Software Product Design
Pixels
Algorithms
Compute
Behavior & Interactions
Business Model

17. Software Product Designer
(Research, Interaction/Behavior, Business, Engineering, Marketing)

18. Craft

19. “[Form] is the combination of feelings
and a function; shapes and things
that come to one in connection with
the discoveries made as one goes
into the wood that pull it all together
and give meaning to form.”
- James Krenov, A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook

20. Warm up away from a machine

21. Designing is defining
No instructions

22. “Practicing” my running
Importance of repetition and volume.
Ira Glass: The Gap.

23. Be a generalist
(but an expert in something, T-shaped)

24. “In the beginner's mind there are
many possibilities, but in the
expert’s mind there are few.”
- Shunryu Suzuki

25. Know your habits
Cowboys, Ninjas and Unicorns. Multidimensional.

26. Just enough design process
Guidelines to fall back on if things go pear-shaped
Checklists and runbooks (Atul Gawande)
Collaborate: succeed or fail together
Quickly get your product to your users (quality/speed balance)
Agency vs. In-house

28. People

29. “It requires a genuine fight to
produce one well designed object
of relatively permanent value.”
- George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree

30. “We’re in violent agreement.”

31. The buddy system
(suiting up)

32. Nonverbal behavior
(Power poses, physical barriers to collaboration)

33. Mentor & Protégé
(be both)

34. Find a design confidant

35. Design management
(we need more leaders)

36. Design +
Engineering ** (conspire to make it real)
Product management
Marketing
Sales

37. “Empathy is a respectful
understanding of what others are
experiencing”.
- Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

38. Business

39. "You can start to use a design as a
tool to spot where the problems
are in a company.”
-Irene Au, Khosla Ventures

40. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t
manage it.”
–Edward Deming

41. Sustainable software products
(let people pay you)

42. Product lifecyle
(inception to EOL)

43. Scale & complexity
(levers and switches)

44. Entropy & Incrementalism
(big ships turn slowly)

45. “Constraints are hard because they
represent the bar, and the bar is high
on existing, successful products.”
- Julie Zhuo, Product Design Director, Facebook

50. The Design Problem

51. Thank you for your attention.
@chrisrivard
clearwired@gmail.com

52. References / Resources / Attribution
Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Conners (1999). Style and Statement. London.
Oxford University Press.
Krenov, James (1976). A Cabinet Maker’s Notebook. Fresno, CA. Linden Publishing
Nakashima, George (2012). The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections. Tokyo.
Kodansha International.
Root, Waverly (1992). The Food of France. New York, NY, Vintage Books.
Goetschius, Percy (1882). Material Used in Musical Composition. New York, NY. G.
Schirmer.
Rosenberg, Marshall (2003). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.
Encinitas, CA. PuddleDancer Press.
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” http://quoteinvestigator.com/
2013/03/06/artists-steal/
Icons from The Noun Project: T-shirt: Josh from Toronto, Food: Rodolfo Alvarez,
Shelter: Public Domain.

53. Set in Raleway
The League of Moveable Type
https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/
@theleagueof