A book that lays out the fundamental concepts of design culture and outlines a design-driven way to approach the world. Humans did not discover fire—they designed it. Design is not defined by software programs, blueprints, or font choice. When we create new things—technologies, organizations, processes, systems, environments, ways of thinking—we engage in design. With this expansive view of design as their premise, in The Design Way Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman make the case for design as its own culture of inquiry and action. They offer not a recipe for design practice or theorizing but a formulation of design culture's fundamental core of ideas. These ideas—which form “the design way”—are applicable to an infinite variety of design domains, from such traditional fields as architecture and graphic design to such nontraditional design areas as organizational, educational, interaction, and healthcare design. The text of this second edition is accompanied by new detailed images, “schemas” that visualize, conceptualize, and structure the authors' understanding of design inquiry. The text itself has been revised and expanded throughout, in part in response to reader feedback.

A ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary volume describing the essence of all design fields, ranging from artistic design to systems design, to educational or instructional design.

Products, technologies, and workplaces change so quickly today that everyone is continually learning. Many of us are also teaching, even when it's not in our job descriptions. Whether it's giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you've ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems. In Design For How People Learn, you'll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you're sharing. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.

"Universal Methods of Design is an immensely useful survey of research and design methods used by today's top practitioners, and will serve as a crucial reference for any designer grappling with really big problems. This book has a place on every designer's bookshelf, including yours!" —David Sherwin, Principal Designer at frog and author of Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills "Universal Methods of Design is a landmark method book for the field of design. This tidy text compiles and summarizes 100 of the most widely applicable and effective methods of design—research, analysis, and ideation—the methods that every graduate of a design program should know, and every professional designer should employ. Methods are concisely presented, accompanied by information about the origin of the technique, key research supporting the method, and visual examples. Want to know about Card Sorting, or the Elito Method? What about Think-Aloud Protocols? This book has them all and more in readily digestible form. The authors have taken away our excuse for not using the right method for the job, and in so doing have elevated its readers and the field of design. UMOD is an essential resource for designers of all levels and specializations, and should be one of the go-to reference tools found in every designer’s toolbox." —William Lidwell, author of Universal Principles of Design, Lecturer of Industrial Design, University of Houston This comprehensive reference provides a thorough and critical presentation of 100 research methods, synthesis/analysis techniques, and research deliverables for human centered design, delivered in a concise and accessible format perfect for designers, educators, and students. Whether research is already an integral part of a practice or curriculum, or whether it has been unfortunately avoided due to perceived limitations of time, knowledge, or resources, Universal Methods of Design serves as an invaluable compendium of methods that can be easily referenced and utilized by cross-disciplinary teams in nearly any design project. This essential guide: - Dismantles the myth that user research methods are complicated, expensive, and time-consuming - Creates a shared meaning for cross-disciplinary design teams - Illustrates methods with compelling visualizations and case studies - Characterizes each method at a glance - Indicates when methods are best employed to help prioritize appropriate design research strategies Universal Methods of Design distills each method down to its most powerful essence, in a format that will help design teams select and implement the most credible research methods best suited to their design culture within the constraints of their projects.

Refactoring is gaining momentum amongst the object oriented programming community. It can transform the internal dynamics of applications and has the capacity to transform bad code into good code. This book offers an introduction to refactoring.

This book is for designers, developers, and product managers who are charged with what sometimes seems like an impossible task: making sure products work the way your users expect them to. You'll find out how to design applications and websites that people will not only use, but will absolutely love. The second edition brings the book up to date and expands it with three completely new chapters. Interaction design - the way the apps on our phones work, the way we enter a destination into our car's GPS - is becoming more and more important. Identify and fix bad software design by making usability the cornerstone of your design process. Lukas weaves together hands-on techniques and fundamental concepts. Each technique chapter explains a specific approach you can use to make your product more user friendly, such as storyboarding, usability tests, and paper prototyping. Idea chapters are concept-based: how to write usable text, how realistic your designs should look, when to use animations. This new edition is updated and expanded with new chapters covering requirements gathering, how the design of data structures influences the user interface, and how to do design work as a team. Through copious illustrations and supporting psychological research, expert developer and user interface designer Lukas Mathis gives you a deep dive into research, design, and implementation--the essential stages in designing usable interfaces for applications and websites. Lukas inspires you to look at design in a whole new way, explaining exactly what to look for - and what to avoid - in creating products that get people excited.

Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible. Written by one of the world's top game designers, The Art of Game Design presents 100+ sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game’s design, encompassing diverse fields such as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, puzzle design, and anthropology. This Second Edition of a Game Developer Front Line Award winner: Describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design Demonstrates how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in top-quality video games Contains valuable insight from Jesse Schell, the former chair of the International Game Developers Association and award-winning designer of Disney online games The Art of Game Design, Second Edition gives readers useful perspectives on how to make better game designs faster. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.