DESIGN THINKING
Designers Are Motivated by Time
Marty Rayala
We often associ- ate art with timelessness but for designers it is timeliness that is
essential. Designers have
deadlines. Design projects
have a finite amount of time
in which they must be completed. Missing a deadline
can cost you future assignments.
Design Deadlines
Every designer has a favorite story about meeting a
tight deadline. An architect
had been asked to design a
home for a wealthy client
but when the client called
to say he was on his way to
see the design there wasn’t
a single line put to paper.
The architect put the phone
down, sat down at a drafting
table and, in the few hours it
took Edgar Kaufmann to get
to Taliesin, nervous apprentices watched as drawings
flowed from the pencil of Frank Lloyd
Wright, room by room, floor by floor,
for the building that would become
known as Fallingwater, the most
famous private home in the world.
Urban planners often work in a
method that has become known as a
charette. A design charette consists
of an intense period of design activity
involving multi-day meetings in which
designers talk with stakeholders such
as public officials, business owners,
and citizens. Having a set deadline
is important to gather as much input
as possible and deliver a design that
surpasses everyone’s expectations in a
reasonable time frame.
Time is always a factor in the artroom.
Designing How We Wait
A key design challenge
today is managing subjective time—time flying by,
time dragging slowly—the
perception of time as we
experience it. Interaction
designers pay close attention to how people perceive
time while waiting in line
for a service or event (
minutes), waiting for service
on the phone (seconds), or
waiting for their computer
to respond to a command
(milliseconds). Computer
programmers, service
designers and event designers all use design strategies
to minimize our subjective
perception of waiting. By
providing visual distractions and using other design
strategies, designers can cut
down on a user’s perception of the passage of time
and make their experiences
more enjoyable.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the ways
designers are motivated by time.
Whether they are designing images,
objects, places, or experiences, designers use their unique skills to manage and manipulate time in ways
not typically found in traditional art
media. Design students should have
experiences working toward a deadline, designing time-based media, and
learning how to make our experiences
of the passage of time productive and
enjoyable.
Martin Rayala teaches at Kutztown
University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania.
Rayala@kutztown.edu
Designing Time-Based Media
Deadlines aren’t the only time design-
ers have to be hyper-attentive to.
Animators break down stories into
thousands of full-color drawings each
seen for only a twenty-fourth of a sec-
ond. Twenty-four frames for every sec-
ond of film are timed so the lips and
movement of characters are perfectly
matched to voices, sound effects, and
music on the soundtrack. James Cam-
eron plans to revolutionize filmmak-
ing by shooting the sequels to his film
Avatar at higher frame rates ( 48, 60, or
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