The Ten Living Principles - The Craft And Creed of Transformative Digital Design

By Ken Bodnar

You have the power within you to be transformative digital design wizard!  It takes a dazzling array of personal and professional attributes to create things that change the trajectory of how mankind interacts with others and technology.  It is both a craft and a creed, a science and an art, and a discipline and a practice. The Ten Living Principles is a framework for revolutionizing your creative abilities.

The framework is a distillation of the Steve Jobs recipe for changing the world.  These are the same type of principles that the ultimate master designer of all time, Steve Jobs followed.  It is a fusion of self-improvement, Eastern Thought, cutting-edge science, and human factors engineering coupled with attributes of beauty, simplicity and truth.  It changes you, the way that people see you as a designer and the way that people interact with technology.  It puts a whole new spin on making ideas happen, where the onus is on the designer to transfer the Eureka moment to reality in an elegant, graceful, intelligent and artistic way.

Whether you are a programmer, graphic artist, writer, industrial designer, robotics engineer, sales and marketing guru, inventor, web developer, student  or artist, or whatever discipline you follow that requires you to design anything, you can't jump to the big leagues without a plan and some practice.  This book gives you both. It is time that we took back the work of digital from the meat factories of the cubicle farm, and become renowned craftsmen, who hallmark our revolutionary work with excellence.

The Ten Living Principles that will make you the best person AND design artisan that you can possibly be.  It shows you how these Ten Living Principles translate to a physical or digital design.  It reveals the two most necessary elements that every transformative design today must have.  It spells out in the three attributes that all designs must have after the Eureka moment to be successful. It gives you the freedom to open up and let the best of you shine.

In keeping with these principles, this book has the value proposition of an intelligent design.  It is probably the first book that is specifically designed and laid out to be read on a digital screen.   If you have ever wondered what the future of reading for human beings will look like, this gives you a small glimpse of what to expect, based on the latest Human Factors research .  It could be the template for all new eBooks.

But even more than all of the above, this book is a call to action.  It is time to hallmark the digital world with personal excellence in execution of design. If there is one thing that the world needs more of, is transformative digital designers.  It could be you! 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Bodnar
• Release date: Aug 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516389506

Book preview

Table of Contents

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Introduction

Chapter 1  - The Artist, the Wizard and the Craftsman

Chapter 2  - The User Experience of Design

Chapter 3  - The Necessity of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach

Chapter 4  - Why Yogic Principles

Chapter 5  - Living Principle 1 ~ Ahimsa

Chapter 6  - Living Principle 2 ~ Satya

Chapter 7  - Living Principle 3 ~ Asteya

Chapter 8  - Living Principle 4 ~ Brahmacharya

Chapter 9  - Living Principle 5 ~ Aparigraha

Chapter 10 - Living Principle 6 ~ Shaucha

Chapter 11 - Living Principle 7 ~ Santosha

Chapter 12 - Living Principle 8 ~ Tapas

Chapter 13 - Living Principle 9 ~ Svadhyaya

Chapter 14 - Living Principle 10 ~ Ishvarapranidhana

Chapter 15 - The Practice & Process of Transformative Design

Chapter 16 - Intelligence in Design

Chapter 17 -  Your Personal Cognitive Toolbox

Epilogue

About The Author

Introduction

A good design will always be transformative, even when it stops being cool.

The circuits in our heads  have been indelibly reprogrammed   through the artifices of the great revolution.  The revolution has come without any great razzle-dazzle  and ninety percent (90%) of the human population has not noticed it to any great degree.  The revolution has been taken for granted   as the normal course of affairs.  It is a revolution in the workplace, the job sphere, and the way that we pass information to each other.  What technology has wrought,  has never been seen before by human beings,   and it challenges our nature to its very core.  Everything that enters our brains through our biological sensors of eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and touch  is information of one kind or another.  And nothing has changed more fundamentally in the human condition  than the quality, volume, variety, type and velocity of information that enters the human brain.  At one time,  it was just all talk and our ears did all of  the work.

Talk Was Cheap And The Only Game In Town

The ancient way of passing information was through oral history and oral tradition. In ancient African society,  it was the griot who told the history in a long poem.  The Vikings passed information through their sagas.  During the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, the repositories of information were the monasteries, monks, scribes, troubadours, town criers   and handwritten letters passed around by the cognoscenti and learned ones.   All of the information was written by hand on vellum   and stored in libraries that mere mortals (ordinary folks)  did not have access to.  Man did not spend his time bolted to a chair,   but lived in a world of physicality, and through his lifetime,   would absorb as much information  as there is today in the weekend edition of the New York Times.  Verbal information transmission,  was simply not suited to a heavy cognitive load.

The Printed Word And Other Eyefuls

As the history of human society progressed,   so did the way that information was transmitted.  Gutenberg invented the printing press,   and books, leaflets, pamphlets, posters and tracts were suddenly available ubiquitously to almost everybody.    But it was an era of slow delivery time where if you wanted to send a packet of information,   such as a letter or a book, it took a week or more to arrive.    In the early days,   information traveled by Pony Express,   then in the mail cars of Iron Horses or the railway.  Samuel Morse came along and invented the telegraph.  Information now traveled in a wire,  and it was a digital form consisting of binary dots and dashes,   but was disseminated at an average speed of much less than 35 words per minute  which was the transmission record in 1942.    The telegraph was used for short messages only.

Even media capable of carrying a considerable amount of information was much smaller.  The New York Times edition that came out on December 1, 1900 had 16 pages.  Now the shortest section in the paper is over 16 pages long.  So we could now transmit words and still images, but only as fast as one could deliver the medium that it was printed on.  The immediacy factor was missing.  Electricity in a copper wire, could solve the immediacy factor.

Buzzing Lines and Birds on a Wire

Telegraph was slow, and along came Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876.  In a certain sense, Bell was an interloper.    He took mankind from the binary digital world of the dots and dashes of the telegraph,   to the analog voice transmission of the telephone.  It would be at least 130 years before the phone turned back to its digital binary roots of the telegraph,   and the human voice was sliced and diced into Internet Protocol packets.  But for the meantime, the route of information through copper wire was limited by where the copper was laid.  To escape the copper wire, we needed to leap into the atmosphere.

The Sound And Picture ~ She Moves Through The Air

The next big leap forward was the invention of the radio.    Now information could be broadcast to millions.    We moved from the paradigm where information is passed from a surface  to where a device passes information using our other senses other than vision.   From the radio evolved television, and we moved from just getting information with just one sense, to using multiple senses.    The information load was multiplied.    It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and you received a barrage of information of the voice as well as the image.  It solved the timeliness problem, but one had to be constantly available when it was broadcast.  We needed a way to make it on demand.  Video tape tried, and so did CD and DVD ROM, but it was a net that solved that.

The World Wide Wait

In our human history, the internet is a latecomer, but it has taken the task to outstrip radio, television and movies  as a purveyor of information.    As a matter of fact,  it has subsumed all other media   and is has become the carrier signal for it.    Like a giant amoeba,   it has swallowed all of the other media,  be it photographs, music, television shows, newspapers and movies.    There is more.    The internet is available on a multitude of devices  that are just as transformative to our lives  as was the printing press, the invention of radio  and the emergence of television.

Push Versus Pull

But there is still a major difference with the way that we get our information now.  Before, we could get our information from television and the radio passively.    We would turn it on, and it would come to us.    There was no other interaction with the delivery device  until it was time to shut it off ,  unless you fiddled with the dials to change the station.  These days, the delivery device is never turned off.  In the case of a cell phone,  it still beckons us from the bedside table when we sleep.  The internet never sleeps.

A Dog Out of a Machine

For the first time in human history, man  (I use the term generically ..  women too)   must interact with a machine  for most of the day and perhaps a lot of the night.    We are connected by ethereal bands of communications   that we cannot see,   but manifest themselves in a digital-based reality   that has overtaken and transcended the space that we live and work in.    And it is addictive,  because the digital sphere brings us life from everywhere,   and some of it is bound to be more exciting  than the lives that we live in the real world. 

Virtual Reality And Pruning of the Senses

Our eyes,   accustomed to hunter-gatherer or agrarian pursuits,  now focus on a matrix of light emitting diodes  forming a display of pixelated reality.    We have a portal to a new universe that is distributed around the world,   and yet you cannot touch , feel or smell.    You can only see and hear it.    The rest of the senses are shut off from this wonderful, world wide web.  And since the computer is used at work,   many times the audio is muted,   leaving only the eyes to stimulate us.    The eyes are usually the only sense that is stimulated   when we enter the World Wide Web of Wonder.  This is, almost contrary to our inborn nature.    The only tactile stimulation that we get, comes from the design of the device bringing us this information.  The reduction of our natural senses in the transmission of information cause our ever facile brains to react and adapt.

Brain Stretchers ~ Neuroplasticity

The most recent research into the human brain, shows that when one or more of our sense are impaired, we sharpen others to replace them.    It is a kind of neuroplasticity where brain function adapts to new conditions and creates new ways of reacting to stimulus and information that it receives.  Thus,  if we can only experience something with our eyes, our eyes become extremely sharp at categorizing, classifying and absorbing the information of what they see.  They do it quickly without us overtly noticing it.

Not Filet Mignon Again!

With our sharpened ability at visual classification and sorting,   we also experience impact fatigue quickly.    Here is a good example of what I am referring to.    Think of a song that mesmerized you when you first heard it.    Go back and listen to that song twenty more times.    On the twenty-first time, does it still mesmerize you the same way?   Of course not.  Your neural nets have adapted to it sensory influence.    You have impact fatigue.  Keep hitting the same nerve over and over again, and it gets used to the stimulus.   It still produces pleasure but it is not as powerful as when you heard it for the first time.  As I am writing this, I am listening to Mozart's various pieces of String Quartet movements (K.575 Movement II to be exact).    While they are still beautiful,   they don't transport me to someplace wonderful like they did the first few times that I heard them.

The reason that I refer to this brain neuroplasticity or adaptation,  is that when we have to traverse the portal to the World Wide Web,  or interact with a computer  or any other device with our eyes only,   we are training our brains to react with a minimum of visual cues.    That is all we have.    We cannot feel, touch, taste or smell  the screen of the  virtual world,   so our eyes do all of the sensory input.    After using electronic devices for awhile,   we begin to thin-slice.   

Thin-Slicing

Thin-slicing is the term that we use to make decisions within the first few seconds of being introduced to anything.    Thin-slicing describes the ability to find patterns in events based only on "thin slices,"  or narrow windows  of experience.  When it comes to the digital experience,  and interacting with a machine using our eyes only,  we become accustomed to making decisions about what information presented to us is noise,   and what information has a value proposition for us.    We thin slice.    We make the decision almost subconsciously and most of the time we don't know why.  Moreover, brain studies show that that observations made within the first few minutes were unchanging,   even after careful consideration and re-consideration.  When taking more time to think about what we have seen,  we still stick to our thin slice.    And what we see, has less and less impact the more that we see it.

Impact Fatigue and Novelty Addiction

When you couple the fact that we humans thin-slice and that we experience impact fatigue, the classifiers in our brains  soon begin to see the deluge of information as noise, and not worth paying attention to.  They start ignoring almost all of the memes and the message and information flow,   and pick up only on those visual designs  that satisfy their values criteria.  And oftentimes, that criteria is novelty.  The internet is a masterful dealer of the addictive drug of novelty. 

As digital designers,  in the novelty and content sense,  we must recognize that it is a very Darwinian, dog-eat-dog world out there.    We are all competing for the attention   of the people who view and use our web pages, programs, audio visual displays, posters, ads and presentation products.    This competition for the personal engagement and experience is  a zero sum game.    That means that if our prospective audience is grabbed by someone else,   we lose.

Everybody is a Comedian (and wannabe designer)

When it comes to physical design, because the creation tools are available to everyone ubiquitously, there is