Issue 014: Finding Time to Design, Cards for Humanity, The Tyranny of Chairs

I’m not a fan of meetings. And as a designer, you’re probably not too. José Torre offers a few tips.

For the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of designers online complaining about their lack of time to design.

They have a packed agenda full of meetings and, if they’re lucky, they have little blocks of an hour of less to design.

This is nothing new, I’ve been there.…That’s why I want to share some tips that helped me gain some of my time back from the meetings overlords, and I hope they can help you too.

The authors write:

But despite the potential for staggering time savings [from not having a daily commute], many have struggled to achieve everything they hoped the pandemic would finally make time for: baking sourdough, meditating, or writing the next great literary masterpiece. On the contrary, data we collected from 12,000 people across the U.S. and Europe during the pandemic show that the additional time is often burned on unproductive work and unsatisfying leisure activities. Having more time does not necessarily mean that we use it wisely. So, what are we doing wrong?

I had to do a double-take on the name. The preposition is for not against. Design consultancy Idean made a free online card game to help “…challenge the inclusivity of the product being designed and hopefully usurp any assumptions or subconscious choices the designers have made, based on their own personal experiences and biases.”

Sara Hendren gives us a deep dive into the history of the chair and its effects on our bodies:

Sitting for hours and hours can weaken your back and core muscles, pinch the nerves of your rear end and constrain the flow of blood that your body needs for peak energy and attention. Most people’s bodies are largely unsuited to extended periods in these structures. Extensive research confirms that sitting in chairs is correlated, [design historian Galen] Cranz notes, with “back pain of all sorts, fatigue, varicose veins, stress and problems with the diaphragm, circulation, digestion, elimination and general body development”. There is growing evidence that relentlessly sedentary jobs – in some, such as bus driving and forklift operating, bodies are literally strapped to chairs – are harmful enough to shorten life expectancy.

Once you become a designer, you look at the world differently. Everything needs to be redesigned, so it seems. Director of Product Design at HBO Max, Michael McWatters:

Many designers think of design as an act of creation, an additive process, a form of construction. These characteristics are of course essential parts of the design process. But good design actually begins with an act of demolition and deconstruction, of tearing things apart before ultimately reconstituting them in a better way. It starts either by finding flaws in an existing product or experience or ripping away at assumptions to create something wholly new and novel.

MUSIC X DESIGN (Thursday, September 3, 9am PDT / 12pm EDT, Free) Twelve DJs from Berlin, Chicago, and Detroit will spin for 24 hours, celebrating each city’s music. 

(I couldn’t find any more mention-worthy events in early September so I’m repeating a couple from last week.)

Resume Building Workshop (Wednesday, September 2, 3:30pm PDT / 6:30pm EDT, $5) If you need some tips on how to brush up your resume and optimize for modern applicant tracking systems, you won’t want to miss this workshop hosted by AIGA Connecticut.

Exploring Design + Ethics (Thursday, September 10, 3pm PDT / 6pm EDT, Free) Leaders from IBM, American Specialty Health, and others will discuss our moral obligations as designers, who can have so much impact on today’s society. This thought-provoking event is organized by our friends at Nilll Design.

Accordion Icons: Which Signifiers Work Best? (nngroup.com) Nielsen Norman Group researched what the best icon to use to signify an expandable accordion was. TL;DR: the downward-facing caret.

What pandemic video trends reveal about consumer needs (thinkwithgoogle.com) Google released some research about what YouTubers are talking about these days during the pandemic.

Goldman Sachs Has Money. It Has Power. And Now It Has a Font (nytimes.com) British design firm Dalton Maag created a bespoke typeface for Goldman Sachs called Goldman Sans.

.@AOC’s answer to a question about the news media is worth reading (twitter.com) This quick primer by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how to consume news and information in today’s media environment is worth a look. It’s non-partisan.

This giant glowing orb is the world’s first floating Apple Store (theverge.com) You’ll float too! Yes, there’s now a floating Apple Store in Singapore.

@Stupidfanficmo1 on Twitter realized that the models in the meme-ified “jealous girl/unfaithful guy” photo have a whole backstory on Shutterstock. Read the whole thread.