WELCOME
This issue of Being Designerly has curated articles about thinking like designers, metaverse fashion week, empathy, state of UX research, deceptive design, innovation, and a visualization of reasonable daylight savings time and its impact.
April Fools' Day: How it started and some pranks that went wrong
Let's get April Fools' Day out of the way - this article highlights the history and some fails - including some designs gone wrong (looking at you, Google Mic Drop of 2016). And no, don't go looking for choco-mayo pictured here (though some of the combinations you see on shelves do come close!)
Onto our regular, non-April-Fools'-feed of Being Designerly...
usatoday.com
FEATURE
5 tricks to help you think like the world’s greatest designers
In this new book, How Creativity Rules the World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas into Gold, Maria Brito does a deep dive into the habits, skills, and tools used by the most creative people in history. Instead of being intimidated by what they achieved, be inspired by their creative process and think about how to replicate it.
fastcompany.com
Metaverse Fashion Week: The hits and misses
The most high-profile fashion event in the metaverse yet brought together mainstream brands and digital upstarts. Reviews were mixed.
Virtual real estate platform Decentraland jumped at the opportunity to recruit fashion brands and fans to its blockchain-based platform for the four-day event. The verdict so far? Mixed and possibly premature, but in terms of excitement and eyeballs, a success, according to brands and metaverse consultants.
The series of fashion-focused events, which ended Sunday, attracted a wide variety of brands and creatives, including Etro, Dundas, Dolce & Gabbana and Estée Lauder. Still, some notable players in the metaverse, including Gucci and Ralph Lauren, did not participate. The entire experience was blockchain-based, created on land sold as NFTs and digital fashion bought and worn as NFTs.
voguebusiness.com
EMPATHY
Ideas & Empathy: How to Design and Communicate with Others in Mind
This podcast episode features Sarah Stein Greenberg, Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the Stanford d.school, and author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways.
She discusses how design and communication require seeing things from more than just our own point of view, and the tools we can use to broaden our perspectives.
stanford.edu
VISUAL
Should You Hate Daylight Saving Time?
Recently the Senate passed a bill that would make Daylight Savings Time (or DST) permanent by unanimous consent. But even though we may gripe twice a year about the sudden time changes, would making DST permanent be a good thing?
Back in 2015, Andy Woodruff took a deeper look into DST and mapped out how the time changes affect sunrise and sunset times across the United States. Andy’s Should You Hate Daylight Savings Time infographic uses “reasonable” Sunrise time at 7:00 AM or earlier and “reasonable” sunset time of 6:00 PM or later. However, you can interact with his maps and create your own “reasonable” times to find out where you stand.
coolinfographics.com
UX
The State of User Research 2022 Report
This report unpacks the findings from UserTesting's annual survey that discusses trends in user research - the art and science, the field, and user researchers. This link will get you to a summary with an option to exchange your email for the full report and the data.
userinterviews.com
The Web Foundation is taking on deceptive design
The Web Foundation‘s Tech Policy Design Lab is working on an interesting-looking project to counter deceptive design — aka dark patterns* — with the goal of producing a portfolio of UX and UI prototypes which it hopes to persuade tech companies to adopt and policymakers to be inspired by as they fashion rules to make the online experience less exploitative of web users.
techcrunch.com
How UX design can inspire innovation
Your UX team should help your organization develop new ideas with experiential designs that demonstrate its focus on innovation and reinvention for users’ delight.
fastcompany.com
