Driving in my car
A lot of my ideas seem to come when I’m driving around in my car, I have a love hate relationship with driving, as it can be a mundane task - getting from point a to point b, especially if it is a daily commute, and it can be annoying - other drivers, traffic jams, bad weather, etc. But it can also be relaxing, sometimes even fun on a nice sunny day with a good cd cranked in the stereo. I almost always have something on my mind when I’m driving, sometimes diving too deep into my head, and sometimes diving deep for something I wouldn’t have found otherwise. As of late I find myself thinking a lot about the user experience, in many contexts, as us humans are almost always using something, and usually that something was designed by someone. Why is that so fascinating? Most people probably never think about it, unless it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to in which case it’s design becomes blatantly obvious as we curse the object and wish it did what we wanted it to do.
Most people would probably never care to wonder why something worked so well, but I guess that’s what separates a designer from someone who isn’t.
Anyway, I was thinking about where my need to design things comes from, particularly information design. And I started thinking about the state of my mother’s house. My mother is the proverbial pack rat, saving nearly every scrap of everything she’s ever owned. Upon my last visit to her house, I noticed a broken picture frame, an out of service vacuum cleaner that is older than me, and Christmas decorations that were probably not put away from last year. Despite my repeated offers, she has always rebuffed my offers to help her “edit” her inventory. So naturally, it occurred to me that perhaps being subjected to the chaos of living in an environment of unorganized “stuff” perpetuated my tendencies to try to make sense of it all. Though, my living space is by no means the apotheosis of tidiness, I was always the neatest one in the family, and always had the compulsion to tidy things up when they became overwhelming. My mind then jumped to another childhood memory, I was always interested in animals from a young age, and my mother who always fostered my interests got me a monthly subscription to these animal cards. They were kind of these encyclopedic cards with information about animals - everything from an elephants to tunicates. Each card was an individual animal. Every month, a new batch would come, all varied types of animal life, and it was up to me to put them in order. I think they had plant cards too, but my mother was the plant person, not me. So, each card contained information about that animal, and listed their place in the animal kingdom taxonomy. I would flip through the little bin of cards and add them into their appropriate place. Probably one of my first encounters with meta data and a complex taxonomy system that I can think of.
Tags: design, user experience