“Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”
D.H. Lawrence

Increasingly, as a Big “D” designer, mostly of complex dynamic systems (spaces, processes and products for people), I find myself stretching the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things I design, which by their nature creates a ‘frame of experience’ between externalized object and the intersubjective experience of the person for whom I design. In an upcoming workshop at Interaction10, “The Right Way to Wireframe™,” four friends and designers explore design through each of our approaches to problem space definition and present shared commonalities we see in our processes even while specific tools vary.  We chose wireframing among many other design communication activities because of it’s contentiousness in the user experience (UX) community – at least as it relates to religious arguments of tools over craft, or indeed, principles.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
Kahlil Gibran

I have described “wireframing” as a form of design communication that enables stakeholders, team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future problem spaces and solutions. Wireframing can be considered first order: the wireframe itself; second order: the process of creating a vehicle of design communication; and third, the cognitive process of envisioning, external actualization and reflection through the selection of a cognitive artifact which expresses a dialogical subjectivity between the Ego and Alter and a multiplicity of positions which they can take with respect to one another.

While “wireframes” are representations of a design made before final artifacts exist, their formalism over sketching makes them problematic. They are created to inform both the design process and design decisions, but they can be conceived as more reified than sketches, and therefore considered more final, which is unfortunate.

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”
Dr Edwin Land

I have often thought that the strategies of both sketching and wireframing can best be characterized by modalities of combinatorian decision analysis. What do I mean by that? At an abstract level, a particular problem space is defined and enframed by the tools we feel most comfortable with: problem space, domain, expertise, theme, context of problem, bias towards types of design tools and documents, timeliness of artifacts created. While I believe I effectively reflected upon wireframes in Shades of Gray, while working through the design of our workshop, it seemed necessary to step back and discuss the role of sketching in my personal design process.

I see sketching as an important pre-wireframing technique for doing divergent and transformative design, something that fundamentally differentiates what has been called “big D,” and “small D” design – not to put to fine a point on it – it is what separates the Designers from the wireframe monkeys. This is the argument that I have made, and base it in part on how Buxton defines design in “Sketching the User Experience,” when he writes:

“What I mean by the term “design” is what someone who went to art college and studied industrial design would recognize as design. At least this vague characterization helps narrow our interpretation of the term somewhat. Some recent work in cognitive science (Goel 1995, Gedenryd 1998) helps distinguish it further. It suggests that a designer’s approach to creative problem solving is very different  from how computer scientists, for example, solve puzzles. That is, design can be distinguished by a  particular cognitive style. Gendenryd, in particular, makes clear that sketching is fundamental to the design process. Furthermore, related work by Suwa and Tversky (2002) and Tcerksy (2002) shows that besides the ability to make sketches, a designer’s use of them is a distinct skill that develops with practice, and is fundamental to their cognitive style.” (Buxton, 2007, p. 96)

Amen. I think as designers we must go out of our way avoiding intra-mental thinking and instead use sketches to restore presence so that we can work interactively by seeing and doing in the recursive, iterative manner sketching seems more suited to than wireframing. As I wrote previously in Shades of Grey: Wireframes as Thinking Device:

“I think of “D”esign as an exploration of the conceivable futures. I use my sketches and wireframes as means to make explorative moves and assess the consequences of those moves. As I explore the problem space, I could relatively easily keep the design models in my head, but I would fail in my primary objective to create a framework for a conversation among the stakeholders, the intended audience, and me.”

My sketches are a model I employ to be able to conceive and predict the consequences of a certain design arguments (for to sketch an interaction, we are making an argument – even one that will be tossed away) within an unresolved problem space whose borders have not been fully defined. Representational means such as sketches, wireflows or  physical models like paper prototypes are important tools for my design since they help in assessing and reflecting on the details of a solution in relation to the whole problematic context in which it is situated. Using pencil and paper speeds up my doing-seeing loop of creation, judgment and reformulation. Few other tools are as fast as pencil and paper in this respect. As a designer, I can draw a line and immediately evaluate it. This conversational process between myself and visualization of the design situation has another effect in that it generates new ideas.

As I draw sketches, I see the problem in another way, perhaps because a line came out slightly wrong on the paper. Taking a step back or looking at a sketch from a different angle may also lead to new ideas and thoughts. New ideas are then nothing but old ideas in new combinations or old ideas looked upon or interpreted from a new perspective  – sketching than becomes what Goffman calls “framing.” This is also what Laseau calls “a conversation with ourselves in which we communicate with sketches.” It is also related to Schön’s concept of a reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation, where I as the designer shape the situation in a way that is in me, so that I can respond to that back-talk. Schön writes:

“In a good process of design, this conversation is reflective. In answer to the situation’s back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves.” (Schön, 1983, p. 79)

The sketches also form a documentation of my design process without adding any administrative overhead. As a designer, I can learn much by browsing back in old sketches; watching the evolution of an idea as my understanding of the problem space is explored, and refined, and this documentation can tell a narrative of design decisions to be shared with internal and external stakeholders who can then see why certain moves where taken, others discarded. Externalizations of different kinds (sketches, wireframes, prototypes) are then especially useful for communication purposes where I want to present ideas to another member of the design team, to the client, or to a user. The presentation sketches are usually not as rough as working sketches are and their purpose is not only to communicate an idea, but also to persuade the other part that a particular design alternative is better than other alternatives.

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer (יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער)

As noted above, the sketch can be rapid and spontaneous, but it leaves stable traces in contrast to conversation, which is evanescent. Conversation (or Talk) is, however, important for the argumentative assessment and communication of design alternatives, which is at the core of my design activities (sketch, present, critique, regine). As designers, we employ a language of talking and sketching in parallel. Schön describes the work of an architectural design professor named Quist in a session with a student:

“In the media of sketch and spatial-action language, he represents buildings on the site through moves which are also experiments. Each move has consequences described and evaluated in terms drawn from one or more design domains. Each has implications binding on later moves. And each creates new problems to be described and solved. Quist designs by spinning out a web of moves, consequences, implications, appreciations, and further moves.”

The quote above is a clear statement of what much of Design work is about. In terms of distributed cognition, it describes design work as distributed over designers and my representational means (e.g. sketches). The representational means (sketches or wireframes) are, in turn, physical embodiments of the culture and history in which they have evolved through the lifecycle of a project I am working on. I think the cultural practices of designers, including the spatial-action language, provide therefore the structural resources for performing experimental design moves. It is part of this ‘knowing-in-action,’ the know-how revealed in spontaneous and I would hope skillfully performed actions. The spatial-action language is also constitutive of our professional community of practice to which I belong in the ways in which we communicate both with ourselves, but also with our teams, clients, and now to you as well.

Photos (on Flickr) by Michael Leis

References:

Buxton, Bill (2007). Sketching the User Experience. Boston, MA: Morgan Kaufman.

Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Tags | design, interaction design, ixd, linkedin, Sketching, user experience design, UX