In our everyday lives there are hundreds of small acts that we unconsciously perform as we go about our routine and interact with objects, environments and the people around us. Thoughtless Acts? by Jane Fulton Suri, the director of human factors for IDEO, is a collection of humble images that is aimed at sharing IDEO’s approach to observing small unconscious acts or as IDEO calls them, ‘Thoughtless Acts’, in order to utilize the key information contained in these acts, for inspiration and/or triggers for creative work.
“Thoughtless acts are all those intuitive ways that we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking.“ Thoughtless Acts? is based around the core of Jane Fulton Suri’s methodologies on observing for human-centered design, which since the publication of the book been pioneered and quantified into a successful formula by the minds at IDEO.
The core theme of Thoughtless Acts? is observation, “design in use” and sharing the approach IDEO uses “in an experiential way”. It is about learning how to observe people in order to help you create more intuitive design solutions. Dived into seven themes such as reacting? or co-opting?, Thoughtless Acts? is filled with a variety of photographs taken by Jane Fulton Suri or IDEO team members that provide “visual evidence of the realities of everyday behavior, of design in use.”
The beginning of most design projects at IDEO “is observation of behavior in a natural setting”, a methodology that began with a Polaroid photograph of a young man. This young man, along with “his friends [was] taking turns riding on top of [a] buildings boiler room door while others were pushing it open and closed with varying degrees of vigor”. Through seeing this behaviour Jane Fulton Suri felt that she had “glimpsed…something subtle but powerfully relevant to the practice of design”. This something, is shared through Thoughtless Acts?. IDEO utilises their observations in their projects in-order to highlight problems and needs that they feel are worth solving and have gone un-noticed or un-addressed by other designers.
Thoughtless Acts? is an invitation to begin observing the people around you as they go about their lives. It is a beginning for learning about how you can utilize observation to inform your industrial design. It provides a great primer for those new to design to start designing based on the behaviors of people. However for many professional designers, most of whom already utilize this practice in their everyday work without even thinking about it, Thoughtless Acts? is probably not so valuable. It is more of a validation that the technique utilized by so many designers has moved into the mainstream, although that may not be a good thing.
Share your thoughts and views on Thoughtless Acts? in the comments. To make up your own mind about Thoughtless Acts? grab a copy from Amazon.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I bought this book about 3 years back. Its superb and a very good observation. As always, IDEO comes out with the best stuff.
I’d recommend everyone to get one for keeps. Whether you’re a designer or not.
i havent read this book, but will try to soon. Whenever i read one of the plethora of IDEO design thinking books it confirms a lot of what i really believe and try to do. However they express the ideas, methods and challenges so succinctly that it becomes a really useful resource to stripping back methods to their original aims.
What i would like to see in IDEO books is more attention to how to slowly infuse your design practice with design thinking/human centred methods, rather than take on a whole new approach over night. It tends to be an unpopular direction to head with managers, purely because of the money and time spent on projects (even if there is end result of innovation). Perhaps its more to do with changing the attitude of those calling the shots….. but how to start