Make the rules!
Well, I guess I really mean articulate some judgments and see how they might inform subsequent
design decisions, but “make the rules” sounds better.
Vetting Wolf, Rode, Sussman, and Kellog emphasize that design relies on judgment, not on
scientific proofs. Judgment arises from the context of a designer’s expertise, the standards and
norms of the design community, and the particularities of the situation at hand.
Your strategy brief is one means of identifying and explaining the judgments that underly your
projects. But sometimes judgments lurk within other artifacts, such as your sketches and
scenarios. Being able to read such artifacts, extract the judgments they express, and then to
interrogate the validity of those judgments is a design skill that we shall attempt to cultivate
throughout our project activities.
While Snodgrass and Coyne imply that experienced designers do not need to articulate their
judgments or the principles on which these rest, because these notions are tacitly understood
within the design community, I would counter that the work expended to describe and explain
one’s foundational understandings and subsequent decisions is never wasted. While the flow of
genius may indeed be hindered by too much internal questioning, a deeper understanding of the
results of our inspired flashes may well help any of us to sharpen and polish our jewels into their
utmost brilliance...or to realize that what we initially thought were surely precious stones are at
their core merely paste imitations.
So, to give us both some structured practice and grist for class discussion, as well as to inform our
later sharing of sketches, in this activity we will:
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Examine a video library, the Texas Archive for the Moving Image (TAMI).
Identify three improvements we would make to TAMI.
Articulate the judgments that underly our suggested improvements.
Determine if the judgments we have made contradict or align with judgments that the
current TAMI site seems to express.
We will then discuss, as a class:
 The design judgments that we feel seem to underly the current TAMI site.
 How our own judgments differ from or align with the existing judgments.
 How our own judgments form the basis for the improvements we have identified, as well
as other potential improvements.
Detailed instructions:
1. Access the TAMI video library at
http://www.texasarchive.org/library/index.php/Main_Page
2. Review the ways that TAMI provides access to videos (search, curated collections, and
the random film generator) and the way it describes each video (which can be seen as
another form of access).
3. Identify three ways you would improve TAMI’s video access mechanisms. These could
be entirely new features, changes to existing ones, etc. If you want to be cute, you could
say that the TAMI site needs to “pop.”
4. Articulate the judgments that your suggestions rely on. That is, when you say “pop,” you
really mean that you want a dominant visual image to lead the eye in one consistent flow
over the page, because you want an established control over what the user reads when, as
opposed to multiple access points. You don’t want anyone to leave the site without
knowing the Boyd’s Toast story. Or, er, you know, for the TAMI context.
5. Examine the judgments that you just explained. Based on the current TAMI site, do your
judgments seem to align with or differ from the current design strategy? For example, the
judgment associated with the “pop” thing and Boyd’s Toast implies an emphasis on
authorial control, while the initial Boyd’s Toast design emphasizes audience control.
6. Be prepared to use your findings to contribute to class discussion.
Time: 25 minutes