Sources / Additional Reading
Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind
Subliminal vs. Supraliminal Priming
Last Week Tonight - Native Advertising
Distinguishing Between Sponsored Advertising
Which Way Did He Go? Lateral Character Movement in Film
Six Feet Under Final Scene
Key Takeaways
- CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS: With every decision you make, what are you assuming the user is already familiar with?
- EMBRACE OBJECTIVITY: Appeal to the most broad objective truths.
- UTILIZE TIME: Interactivity introduces an element of time you can use to your advantage.
- DIRECT FOCUS: Design is often about what you’re not showing just as much as what you do show. The donut hole.
Lecture Outline
- The Tip Of The Iceberg
- The tip of the Iceberg is a hint or suggestion of something much larger
- In design, this means most things we prefer or make judgments on occurs instantly, in more of an automatic, non-reasoned way
- Creativity is just connecting more and more data points, not “random” ideation like most think (convergent and divergent thinking)
- You Process More Than You Notice
- “We reason our way to whatever conclusion we need to reach to support the judgments we have already made for intuitive or emotional reasons.” - Jonathan Haidt
- Thought experiment: You can come up with a justification for pretty much any object to be in a room.
- As a Society, We Make Divisions and Distinctions Arbitrarily
- We like to think of these distinctions as being rules, or based on logic, but they’re often random, and reinforced through repetition
- These distinctions are everywhere in design
- Think about colors:
- Blue + Green = Nature
- Blue + Pink = Genders
- Most advertising today is Supraliminal
- The average person is jaded to advertising, it’s so present we ignore it
- Companies bank on familiarity by exposure, and authenticity through influencer marketing
- Where you intake your messaging matters
- UI & UX
- User Interface and User Experience. Understanding them and their journey.
- People crave understanding WHY something happens. If you understand WHY a user does something, you can design for it.
- Many industrial design tasks are becoming graphic designer ones due to the prominence of digital interfaces
- Think about how things are revealed in movies.
- Certain characters or design elements appear more often (scene by scene, page by page)
- Knowing something in scene 1 changes the meaning of scene 8 (or screen design)
- Show people, don’t tell them. Ex: Putting a sign that says “Push” on a door that LOOKS like a Pull doesn’t help anything.
- Think about not only what you WANT to happen, but what you’re IMPLYING with your design
- Left to right is considered progress, right to left considered regression
- Newton’s Third Law / The Donut Hole concept
- For everything you show, you’re deciding to NOT show something else. Think about that.
- If you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.
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