Notes from Subject to Change
Perhaps more aptly titled “Things Adaptive Path has been thinking about”, [_Subject to Change_](http://www.amazon.com/Subject-Change-Creating-Products-Uncertain/dp/0596516835/) doesn’t really hold together as a book but offers good, concise, somewhat-related essays about design practices.
The book offers some good descriptions of the research and design methods currently in vogue. As an introduction to the field for beginning designers, researchers, and others, it might be more successful, but for design professionals it doesn’t bring much new to the table.
Unfortunately, _Subject to Change_ suffers from the very things it warns about: it is a single, standalone product (the book), containing a series of features (loosely-related chapters), created from technical competency (consulting learnings) rather than people’s (at least design professionals’) needs. Finally, as the authors confessed when speaking at their book talk, the static, final, published nature of a book doesn’t lend itself well to updates and last-minute revisions. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the design process, it’s that it is always “subject to change”…
### Notes
A definition of “design”:
> At heart, we believe design is an activity…[incorporating] these elements (9-10):
>* Empathy…understanding how people will interact with whatever you’re designing.
* Problem solving…used to address complex problems where the outcome is unclear
* Ideation and prototyping…design is a creative activity, and thus requires actually creating something
* Finding alternatives…less about the analysis of existing options than the creation of new options
What is an “experience strategy”? “A star to sail your ship by.” – Jesse James Garrett (24). Reminds me of my solution to [the Steve Jobs problem](http://ryskamp.org/brain/design/steve-jobs-and-the-designer-as-ceo).
“Empathy” for designers:
> Sharing an experience avoids the distance of pity while vicariousness maintains an observer’s level of objectivity. Thus, we could say that empathy is something like a _balanced_ curiosity that can lead to a deeper understanding of another person. (36)
Their chosen term for early-stage/discovery/user experience research? “Design research”:
> It pushes us out of the purely digital world, and focuses us on the ultimate outcome and measure for research efforts–creating successful products and services. (59)
The most convicting part of the book for me was chapter 5, “Stop designing ‘products'”. Again, the value of designing experiences instead of just their components is something designers have known for a while, but here it’s very well-stated and contains good examples:
> The key message here is not to approach a design problem assuming you’ll create a product, a service, and a system. Begin with the experience you want to design for, and then–and only then–identify the components that will deliver it. (95)