first world designer musings
Jan. 15th, 2021 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavrecently i've been thinking why (physical) experience design is the area of design i've genuinely, happily latched on as a whole career spanning calling. UX/UI and digital design has been the hot thing for a while, and it's usually that or motion/print/brand design that is the flashier area that most college grads gravitate to. (not knocking that, but reflecting what about experience is a call for me) (interestingly i got into experience design pretty quickly after dabbling in the rest plus packaging and deciding the others were not for me).
i like tactile stuff. even though i do most of my drawing digitally it's mostly for speed/hack-tool usage and i end up wanting the output to have that tactile quality. (see: recent pivot to zines and web 1.0 page)
physicality. monoliths. in a way - what was the first sapient attempt at design? crude monoliths, beacons, shrines, homes. deliberately designing the physical world long, long before scratching lines in stone was a thing.
i like seeing my monoliths, if you will, out in the wild. ~400 target stores for a run-of-the-mill endcap design - you walk into one, see your shit, and it's not hard to have that very satisfactory glow that you've left a physical mark on the world at least for a while. little less fleeting than a scrap of paper or even pixels that go poof. mine. my mark. there's an ego-grandeur that I understand where architectsand their god-complexes come from.
one of the far, far long term goals is to make something like 'the black book of practical experience design', because i haven't seen anything like it yet. there's a handful of books that have a few pretty pictures of (wayfinding signage) (retail design) (stage design) (video game level design), but nothing on practical theory, nothing about sketching it all out on a napkin and why you're arranging the space the way you're arranging. what's different from a wal-mart entry vs a zelda dungeon boss room vs an egyptian pyramid? from a very macro standpoint, all of those are experiences (that are designed). there's always a purpose, a focal point, a walk-path, so on.
In some ways i feel like i've gotten to a plateau point of getting "good enough" at the the day-by-day stuff on a senior-esque level, but there's a treasure trove of connections to radically different disciplines that very few, if any, have connected.
fuck, i might as well just start posting my scatter-shot notes on a random page of my website and see if it expands into anything useful.
i like tactile stuff. even though i do most of my drawing digitally it's mostly for speed/hack-tool usage and i end up wanting the output to have that tactile quality. (see: recent pivot to zines and web 1.0 page)
physicality. monoliths. in a way - what was the first sapient attempt at design? crude monoliths, beacons, shrines, homes. deliberately designing the physical world long, long before scratching lines in stone was a thing.
i like seeing my monoliths, if you will, out in the wild. ~400 target stores for a run-of-the-mill endcap design - you walk into one, see your shit, and it's not hard to have that very satisfactory glow that you've left a physical mark on the world at least for a while. little less fleeting than a scrap of paper or even pixels that go poof. mine. my mark. there's an ego-grandeur that I understand where architects
one of the far, far long term goals is to make something like 'the black book of practical experience design', because i haven't seen anything like it yet. there's a handful of books that have a few pretty pictures of (wayfinding signage) (retail design) (stage design) (video game level design), but nothing on practical theory, nothing about sketching it all out on a napkin and why you're arranging the space the way you're arranging. what's different from a wal-mart entry vs a zelda dungeon boss room vs an egyptian pyramid? from a very macro standpoint, all of those are experiences (that are designed). there's always a purpose, a focal point, a walk-path, so on.
In some ways i feel like i've gotten to a plateau point of getting "good enough" at the the day-by-day stuff on a senior-esque level, but there's a treasure trove of connections to radically different disciplines that very few, if any, have connected.
fuck, i might as well just start posting my scatter-shot notes on a random page of my website and see if it expands into anything useful.
