Design Sojourn

(This post was updated and edited. The original was published on the 19 Dec, 2005!)

John Maeda, formerly from MIT Media Labs, and now RISD President, spoke about how “good art makes our mind blink”. John was referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink with his art comment.

This is so true, and if we further extrapolate this, I would say “good design makes our mind blink”. In a “blink of an eye” we intuitively understand it, we know what it does, how to engage it, and best of all how to use it.

Intrigued, I manage to get my hands on Blink, and while it often comes across rather academic at times, it does give a better understand of how to harness the power of intuition, or what the author calls “rapid cognition”, in decision making. Designers can benefit from this, especially when our ideas get weighed down by constraints that often makes our concepts drift listless from specification creep.

Via: John’s blog.

Here’s a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s site.

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