Category: About

I haven’t posted in ages. I have a great reason though: I took 2017 off. I highly recommend it to anyone who can afford it (in one sense or another). I did do stuff though. I sold my apartment, put all my things in storage and travelled through Israel then settled down to write a book about information architecture design. It’s almost done.

I did some other things too. Terence and I wrote and presented a paper on strategy design at ICoRD ’17 in India entitled: Conceiving and Applying Relationship Models for Design Strategy. A further version of the paper, co-written by us, was then presented in Hong Kong by Terence at the Design Management Academy International Conference 2017 titled: Experience-led Design Strategy.

In March myself and Dan Klyn conducted the workshop Human-Centered Design and IA at the 2017 IA Summit in Vancouver.

Terence, Tasmin Donaldson and myself put on World IA Day in Johannesburg last year and this year. At the latter I presented some of the new thinking to be included in my book.

Other stuff…Terence and I are working on a paper for a special edition of the journal Philosophy and Technology. We wrote a chapter for a book soon to be published addressing ‘educating citizen designers’ in South Africa and our paper ‘Wicked Ethics in Design’ will be republished in a new book on ethics and design.

Perhaps not much of a year off, but it’s been great just to do research and write. Long overdue but nonetheless, this year I start my MA in Design at the University of Johannesburg.

At the top of Masada in Israel

I’ve recently become a member of DSD.

The Design Society Development (DSD) DESIS Lab is a multi-disciplinary community of practice, based at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, that seeks to better understand how design can best serve the emerging needs of broader society, specifically in the face of staggering inequality and rapid change in Gauteng, South Africa…

The DSD DESIS Lab meets monthly to interrogate research, projects, methods and products that impact on the intersection and interplay between design, society and development in our specific context.

• We understand design as referring to the conscious choices we make in creating systems (community, society & productive systems) and technologies (products, artefacts, communicative technologies, systems integration);
• society as the human context that includes the broader social systems of culture, economy, politics and environment;
• and development as the discourse and practice of positive and considered change. We draw on critical political economy, social sciences, appropriate technology development, participatory and human-centered design, and other design approaches in our practice and research.

Find out more:

http://www.designsocietydevelopment.org/

http://www.desis-network.org/

…as an ‘important person’ on the Information Architecture page

I’ve been telling people for ages!

Earlier this week 10and5.com published an interview with me. They edited my (very long) response to the last question so I thought to post the full version here.

What is the current state of IA and UX design practice in South Africa?

It’s strange, I was working as an information architect in Cape Town in 1997. I went overseas, the dot com bubble burst and when I returned in 2004 the role had disappeared from the face of SA. Over the past 8 years there’s been a slow resurgence mainly aided by Steve Jobs providing a tangible argument for the role of design in business.

The local design industry (and I’m generalising here) still views UX and digital work in particular, as a somewhat techie and analytical thing – which it’s not. Last I checked, graphic, print, industrial and architectural design still held the lion’s share of presence at the Design Indaba (it may have been different this year, I didn’t attend) which is kind of crazy when you consider that the world has been in the grip of an information and technology revolution for the past 15 years.

There remain only a handful of senior UX people and true UX agencies in South Africa and we need more. A lot of people are coming back, having gained experienced abroad, and hopefully more will come back.

The fields of IA and UX locally are desperate for skilled new entrants and some of the schools and universities are responding (in particular the University of Johannesburg’s Fine art, design and Architecture faculty) but more need to come on board.

Client’s are getting smart on the topic and are often ahead of agencies claiming to do UX (where many of the agencies are just offering sitemaps and wireframes). To help clients, we need standards and better industry organisation – a professional body of some kind would help.

IA and UX are heavily bound up in innovation driven by user-centered methods (true customer experience design). The commitment to this path by clients is often more than they realise.  Designing a corporate website, for instance, using user-centered methods, usually has far reaching implications that influence organisational culture, processes, marketing, other channels… so it’s important for both service providers and clients not to pay lip-service to design and innovation.

That said, it’s a very positive sign that corporates are starting to embed UX into their organisations. Two standout examples are Discovery and Standard Bank.

And lastly, we seem to have only just woken up to the importance of UX design and the next train is already leaving the station; that being Cross-Channel IA, Service Design, Design Thinking, etc. We need to catch-up. There are many common threads between these fields (in the main user-centered research methods and design synthesis techniques) so we need to stop focusing on deliverables and start understanding (and selling) process and principles. This will make the fields more interoperable and push design in the area forward more quickly.

Overseas, these fields are having a huge impact in social spaces (both in the developed and developing world). We have a desperate need for more designers to place value in having an impact on our society and a move away from design for sales, marketing, big brands and awards.

…at last. It’s taken forever but there you go. Tell some friends, follow, comment. Do all the usual. I hope you enjoy the content.