design

One example of an element in Half-Life 2 that damaged our game, was in Ravenholm we added the behavior where the phys-cannon could punt zombies which would cause them to flinch and do a little bit of damage, on the theory that more interaction was better.

What ended up happening was a bunch of our early playtesters, including Gabe [Newell], just ran around non-stop punting the zombies and completely missing the fact that they could pick up saw blades or propane canisters and use those, which were much more fun ways of killing zombies as we knew at the time since we'd already done those elements.

So as a result, we decided that element was hurting our game and removed it.

“In a way, it is the very idea of design as an abstract and autonomous entity that is put into question: there is no Design, but designed artefacts, systems and processes, both material and immaterial; there are multiple influencing forces at play, and, in the middle of it all, there are designers, stuck between the grand project of modernity and the ‘smol’ tactics of everyday life.” (34–35)

“Who is more prone to this sentiment [of design disillusionment/disillusioning]? Design disillusion is the ‘feel’ of those who have access neither to the reassurance of the centre nor to the effervescence of the margin, those who feel stuck in some sort of pseudo-cultural, semi-professional suburbia.” (38–39)

“Specialisms have detached themselves from products to become a sort of shared attitude and a common set of cultural and methodological references. More than with the things that they do, designers identify with the sensitivity they adopt when they do those very things. To a certain extent, the contemporary designer is a designer without qualities.” (46)

“We need to relativise these notions [of who a designer is] to be able to see how, and if, they still lead to status. Excellence has always been the rhetorical instrument of a winning elite. But in order to understand elitist aspirations, we need to picture a kind of designer who is not so much part of an elite. This designer is not taken into account by design literature, which mostly focuses on promoting and strengthening the field. I will call this figure the everyday designer.” (48)

“While the image of the design star is intrinsically iconic, that of the everyday designer is admittedly rather blurry, but its function is clear: to avoid exceptionalism.” (50)

“Graphic design is a diluted practice, one in which professionals have to put increasing effort to assert their expertise to clients and society at large. Graphic design is where the necessity of radical openness becomes most obvious, since it’s also where the pro/amateur binary abruptly collapses. Graphic design, one of those “rather inchoate professions” in and around design, might even show the general trajectory of professions.” (51) “... I propose to see graphic design as the widest of the orders [as defined by design theorist Richard Buchanan in 1995, of which the other three are industrial, interaction, environment], as it is more affected by technical, cultural and methodological democratisation: it is spread more diffusely” (51) “across society” (52). “Marco Petroni argues that “[t]oo often in the world of design the harshness of the real is accepted only when translated or rendered imaginative.” ... Ultimately, design is terrified by what it is unable to change. It must systematically repress any manifestation of its impotence.” (63) — constant reinventions, redesigns of “design” itself, in pedagogy/education, in industry.