“Uniquely exciting time to be designing user interface and digital tools”
Wilson Miner is a digital product designer working in San Francisco. He has worked as an interactive designer for Apple in 2006 and gave a talk called ‘When We Build’ in 2011 about how we shape our environment through what we design. After watching his talk, I know have a whole new perspective on how design shapes us and our everything around us.
When Miner started his talk with saying it was going to be a ‘strange talk’ I knew that that it was going to get me thinking about how design impacts us. And it did. The section where Miner focused in on Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher in media theory, I found extremely interesting. McLuhan explored how electronic media impacts our culture and his thinking was ahead of his time, and if someone said what he did in today’s society for the first time, I feel it would still have the same impact as it did originally. The things we design and create a new environment, which in turn changes our outlook. This stood out to me because the way we design the media which portrays the news and what is happening around the world, in particular wars or controversial stories, impacts how we feel about them. This is something that I didn’t realise I have experienced myself until Miner mentioned it.
Miner used the example of the development of the car as his basis throughout the talk to highlight how exactly design does effect our environment. When you look at the car, which has changed appearance a lot over the years, the basics of the engine hasn’t. But if you look at the environment surrounding the car, it has changed dramatically with the production of factories, highways and oil companies. We have changed our whole way of living based around a car. This shocked me. A car is something I have grown up with and is a normal part of life, but when you actually look at how a simple design and invention has changed our landscape, it highlights how important design is on our lives.
“The computer is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds” Steve Jobs
Similar to cars, the computer has always been around for me. Miner’s talk highlighted to me how compared to how we added things to our environment for the car, designers have done the opposite for computers. Instead of adding things to the equation, they are being taken away. As the talk focused in on the digital side of our lives, it really opened my eyes to how the things I take for granted, are actually shaping my whole life. An example Miner made which stood out for me was how ‘the gaps in out lives are filling up with screens’ and that the car may have shaped the 20th century but the screen will shape the 21st. With only being a fraction of the way through this century, I can already tell how the screen has shaped society but simply looking at how, for example, the iPhone has changed over ten years and how screens are getting smaller, linking back to taking things out of the equation rather than adding them.
I really liked a quote Miner used to describe the job of an Interaction Designer which was, ‘not just making pretty interfaces, but building an environment we’ll spend the rest of our lives in…designers are builders’. This gave me a whole new perspective on what I will be doing within Interaction Design and it excites me moving forward.
The last part of Miner’s talk I will be reflecting on is maybe the most important part for me as I make my way through my studies which is how designers are constantly making assumptions. This is something I am guilty of and think that ‘people will just know how to do that’. But Miner pointe out how a lot of complex interface design is based off learned knowledge and with the pace of technological change increasing all the time, it is up to the designers to learn as it is too quick to base designs off of assumptions. By learning, designers can create new environments quicker.
“The smallest changes can be transformative”
I found this talk very informative but not in the way I was expecting. It has changed my mindset on how I look at the design in the environment around me. This will help me when I come to design as with how quick technology is changing, assumptions are no longer an option. Miner had a way with words that he explained something that would usually be quite complicated, but made it come across simple. I am now aware of how vital and influential design and the use of screens are around me and how design can completely change the environment we live in without us really ever noticing until someone points it out.