‘The Moment’ in a Designer’s Mind
In the previous article, I mentioned, “As designers, we’ve all learned to pay attention, identify the grid, break the grid, and make navigating the new grid intuitive.” So, what is it exactly that we’re doing in this generic “pay attention” step? We’re looking for potential. The potential to inspire curiosity, raise awareness, spark pleasure, bring clarity in the lives of the people around us and the list goes on.
If you went to architecture school, you may remember when you were told to design moments? We were told to be sensitive to the moment-by-moment experience of our inhabitants while walking through our space. The moment someone on the ground floor locked eyes with a passerby on the mezzanine. The moment they exited from the low-ceiling corridor into the vast high-ceiling space. The moment they looked up or down, or walked this way or that way, or brushed along this person or that thing. Such tiny little considerations had the potential to make them present in their surroundings, aware of their scale, pleased by the view, etc.
The same principle applies across all design ventures, whether graphic design, product design, instructional design, etc. Across different design industries, we use stories to organize moments within the lives of our users/inhabitants/visitors where they interact with our Thing. We create avatars/personas/profiles that act as embodiments of that story to help us focus and refocus our intention when designing.
But, the moment is so much broader than its relation to designers. It’s the thing we, as laypeople, often take for granted when experiencing it but are intentional when making it that way. This can include rearranging home furniture to avoid kids getting hurt, putting clothes back in the right spot that had fallen from a rack at the store, walking the shopping cart back to its designated spot in the grocery’s parking lot, and so much more.
So, in the endless sea of possibilities, designers pay attention and choose well the moments that will make an individual at ease and pleasantly experience their environment or thing.
Anatomy of The Moment
The Moment /n./: a single potential (from the endless possibilities of “thing” arrangements) in a designer’s mind, occurring in time and space that influences their user’s state of being and leads them into the next potential seamlessly.
Having realized that all I’ve been doing for 15 years was designing moments, regardless of what I called myself, I wondered, “What are the common pieces (underneath all the terminology and attached meanings) that give birth to The Moment?” Location, time, things, intention, and people seem to sum it up.
In her book, How To Make Sense of Any Mess, Abby Covert helped me tidy up what I thought was the crux of The Moment with a vocabulary that aligns all of my thought process. She distinguishes between data, content, and information. Data is facts (like location and time), content is things (like…things), and information she says, is “whatever is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things” (like intention and perception).
So, why do I say this, my dear colleague?
It’s to say that at the core of architecture training is this very thing. By way of feasibility studies to figure out the data, by programming to narrow down the content, by intentionally choosing moments and expressing them through walls and floors, trained architects have come face to face the basics of User Experience design.
Think of UX as an abstraction of what you already know. You switch out the kind of data, content, and information, and the outcome looks different. It may look like an item on a store shelf, maybe it looks like a Google Doc, or it could be food on someone’s plate. We’re all starting on The Moment.
Join in the next post if you’re ready to scale up.
