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All right. So, who am I? My name is Grant Blakeman. I'm a designer, developer, and product guy. I live here in town as an independent, and I've got a background that started in branding. I've done a lot of different things, and I eventually ended up working almost primarily in web applications and software design these days. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about design.
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Before we get into that, I kind of want to clarify what this talk is not about. I can say this because I'm in the company of developers, not designers. As much as I love what I do—my income depends on choosing fonts, colors, and worrying about pixels—I find a lot of those discussions really boring. They’re at a very low level compared to what I think the potential of design really is. I think they’re shortsighted and they miss the point. A lot of that stems from how we define design. On some level, it does involve color choice, fonts, and worrying about line heights, but those things really should be outcomes. They should be responses to the problem or the task at hand. Yet, we often talk about them as if they are the problems we're solving or the solutions, and they shouldn't be an end in itself.
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I’m not here to make you guys fall in love with ampersands or dissect shades of the pseudo-color gray. I want to give you some vision for what design thinking is, how you can be a little more aware of it, and how that might benefit you in other things that you do. I feel like design is about intention. It's really a succession of choices, a culmination of choices toward a desired outcome. To put it more simply, it's supposed to help us solve problems. There’s a visual component depending on the type of design you’re doing, but there’s also a process component, a logic component, and a bunch of different facets of design. As designers, we try to train ourselves to work through these problems and find solutions that address these different components.
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We often do this in a very secondhand or second nature type of way, and it may look like all we're doing is saying, 'Oh, I think the color blue is really nice, and we should use that.' But those choices are more significant than that. Good design thinking takes advantage of recognizable techniques, themes, and processes. Really good designers often don’t even call themselves designers; they might not even be aware that they’re designers, and they certainly might not be the kind of guys who wear black-rimmed glasses and worry about typefaces.
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I almost titled this talk "Being a Beer Snob Makes You a Better Person." For those of you who are not from Colorado, you might not know that we have an obsession with craft beer. My favorite pub is right down the street, a place called Mountain Sun. Every February, they have this event called Stout Month. Over the course of the month, you can sample 30 to 40 different stouts, both on their own and paired with friends. They just rotate taps throughout the month, and it’s really amazing. They have stouts with unique flavors like mint or coconut. There are so many amazing flavors that represent niches within an already niche category of beer.
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As you engage in this process, if you ever get one of their samplers, you quickly realize that what makes a good microbrew or a good beer, in general, is balance. It’s all about the right proportions; a little too much coconut or not enough coffee might ruin the whole experience. The order in which you add the ingredients while brewing is crucial. These decisions about balance can affect not just the overall beer but even the subtleties of the aftertaste. One of my dad's friends is a former engineer turned brewer; he's meticulous about brewing his beer, just as you’d expect from an engineer. But when you get him to talk about flavor and how he creates those flavors, he lights up. In those moments, he transforms from an engineer into an artist, experimenting with delicate balances of ingredients while always adhering to a rigid brewing process.
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He's creating something new and spectacular, merging various components. He knows that if one little thing falls out of balance, it can ruin an entire batch of beer. For me as a designer, balance is one of my most essential tools; I think of it more as an indicator than as something to take action on right away. Many times, you can look at a process you're designing and see that something’s off or out of balance, and you can compensate for it. However, often you just have this gut feeling that something isn’t right, and you need to take a step back to figure out where you went wrong.
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This isn’t something that designers have exclusive ownership over; we’ve just worked really hard at recognizing it and getting good at addressing it. You might already be using balance as an indicator in your teams, projects, and even your life. You often know when something is off and needs to be addressed, but the problem arises when we ignore these indicators and push through to get something done. Balance becomes harder to correct the longer you wait.
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I was out in Moab, Utah, a couple of years ago at a place called Gemini Bridges, which is pretty famous if you’ve been to Moab. I was watching some guys tightrope walk across these giant land bridges a few hundred feet above the canyon floor. They were roped in for safety, but they made it look easy. If you watched closely, you would see that they were constantly adjusting themselves and making tiny course corrections. If they waited too long to make an adjustment, the errors would compound, and they would fall. This illustrates why balance is vital; when you're managing a project or building a product, you must constantly assess balance along the way, or it can get out of whack quickly.
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Let’s switch gears and talk about style; that’s another area where we talk a lot about design. From an aesthetic viewpoint, there are all sorts of styles—grunge, postmodern, Gothic, and minimalism. One of my favorites is minimalism, but the thing with style is that all these styles usually come from a guiding philosophy. Those philosophies extend beyond how things are visually represented. With minimalism, it’s about stripping things down, removing unnecessary clutter, and streamlining processes. One of my favorite design gurus, Dieter Rams, encapsulates it with the mantra "less is better." Of course, it can be taken to an extreme.
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A significant aspect of minimalism is something called white space or negative space. As a designer, you allow things room to breathe and interact with each other. I extrapolate this principle to real life: if you've ever solved problems in the shower or had great ideas while mowing the lawn, those moments arise from giving your brain that negative space. Personally, I do a lot of trail running here, and that's my form of negative space that allows me to clear my head and respond to whatever comes into that empty space. I think it's crucial to identify your own negative space and actively protect it—schedule it into your calendar or daily routine—because there is something magical about creating a buffer to process life.
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Speaking of trail running, Boulder is famous for its beautiful open space parks, which is one reason many of us choose to live here. The bigger story, however, is that citizens began purchasing land for preservation as early as the 1800s, and the city has continued that tradition. If you start mapping it out, it’s not perfect, but essentially, Boulder has built a doughnut around the city where development is not allowed. This preserved land creates an artificial constraint that significantly shapes Boulder today. It’s one reason we have higher density housing downtown, with cycling corridors and public transportation. We’ve used this artificial constraint to respond to urban planning needs, shaping the city in a positive way. Without it, I really think we would just be another forgettable suburb of Denver.
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Constraint is another one of my favorite tools as a designer, and I'd even posit that it’s one of the most necessary aspects of good design. Every project has inherent constraints—such as time and budget—but one thing you can do is utilize those constraints and even build in additional ones. The solutions we propose as designers are responses to those constraints, and we can use them to drive projects forward. Without constraints, projects might not get finished, and things can become unfocused or poorly executed. Many people want to say that designers should think outside the box; it’s an old cliché. But what designers really mean when they say that is that they want to trade one box of constraints for another box with different constraints that they think might fit the project goals better.
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You can never eliminate constraints; you can only find different ones to work with and respond to differently. Those are just a few concepts I think about during my design process. The key question is: how do I pull them all together to make good decisions or balance things well, or take good advantage of negative space or implement constraints? A significant part of this is simple observation.
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The key is going into anything—projects, teams, life—realizing we don’t know what we don’t know. The sooner we can confront that fact, the better. The best way to determine what questions to ask and what problems to solve is to observe. Observation can take many forms: testing, market research, and formal processes, but it can also be as simple as watching and trying to have no agenda. You might even try walking a different way home or talking less and listening more.
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You’re about to head out to lunch; you could easily head to Pearl Street in Boulder, which is a fantastic place for people-watching. Just sitting on a bench and observing will help you notice patterns of behavior. Pay attention, and you’ll discover patterns that interest you or occasionally confuse you, because humans are quirky like that. The main idea is to become aware of what's going on around you. It's about stepping back a little instead of continuously pushing forward with daily life.
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Design thinking is fundamentally about awareness, and that awareness arises from observation. I’ve lived in Colorado for most of my life, and it’s a beautiful state. I've seen rattlesnakes, bald eagles, and bears, but I’ve never actually seen a mountain lion. Sometimes when I'm trail running at dusk, I get that feeling that something’s watching me. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling, where the hair on the back of your neck stands up; it’s happened to me a couple of times so powerfully that I had to stop and look around. Of course, I’ve never seen anything.
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I know they’re out there. Mountain lions rarely attack humans—it can happen, but it's very uncommon. However, if you’re a deer, that’s something you’re constantly vigilant for. You know the areas where they roam because if you see one, it’s too late. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but problems in life are a lot like that. By cultivating awareness through design thinking, being mindful of your decisions, and being intentional about your choices, you’ll be better equipped to process issues.
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It's not foolproof, but it’s a framework that helps you anticipate problems and keep projects, teams, and life headed in the right direction. Those are some of my thoughts on design thinking. I try to apply these principles beyond just where I place pixels on a web page or in print. If you have any questions or thoughts, I would love to hear them. Thank you very much.
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Yes, how do you convince yourself to do this when you’re really busy?
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The question is, how do you convince yourself to do this when you’re busy? I’ll be the first to say I struggle with this, but part of the negative space thing, for me, is becoming more intentional about finding that space. It can be as small as 20 minutes a day, but recognizing that when I'm pounding my head against a problem, I often stop making any progress.
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I'm not allowing for that secondary process in our minds that happens when we give ourselves a little time or space. Building it into your schedule and being more intentional about leaving room for that is huge.
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Is there anything else?
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Cool, well, have a good lunch, guys.