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Dubberly Design Office
2501 Harrison Street, No. 7
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Articles
What is Systems Design?
The following text is the pre-edited version of an interview of Hugh Dubberly by Dan Saffer. The interview was performed via email in February of 2006, and was later published in Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices.
What is systems design?
Systems design is simply the design of systems. It implies a systematic and rigorous approach to design—an approach demanded by the scale and complexity of many systems problems.
Where did it come from?
Systems design first appeared shortly before World War II as engineers grappled with complex communications and control problems. They formalized their work in the new disciplines of information theory, operations research, and cybernetics. In the 1960s, members of the design methods movement (especially Horst Rittel and others at Ulm and Berkeley) transferred this knowledge to the design world. Systems design continues to flourish at schools interested in design planning and within the world of computer science. Among its most important legacies is a research field known as design rationale, which concerns systems for making and documenting design decisions.
Navigating Dynamic Databases
This article introduces several issues related to the problem of navigating multi-dimensional data spaces—large databases. It examines problems with trying to conform data to a single taxonomy and the limits of tree structures as navigational devices. It offers several alternative devices, and it notes the need to enable random, multi-variate filtering so that users may narrow and expand at will. It also introduces the concept of pivoting: narrowing along one path and turning (or pivoting) to expand along another path.
Becoming a Digital Designer
The following text is the pre-edited version of an interview of Hugh Dubberly by Steven Heller. The interview was performed via email in April of 2006, and was later published in book form in 2007.
You were a true pioneer in the digital world, when we just called it “computers,” what made you jump into the breach so early?
When I was an undergraduate at RISD, Chuck Bigelow introduced me to digital type design. Dutch type designer Gerard Unger was also teaching at RISD. They encouraged students to focus on low resolution type. For me, that led to a summer job with Xerox working on type for some of the first laser printers. Chuck also introduced me to Don Knuth’s work on Metafont, a programming language for describing typefaces. As a grad student at Yale, I designed a typeface using Metafont. Several of my classmates from RISD also got involved in font design.
Middle-Out Design
Nearly a year after the project had begun, Dubberly Design Office was brought on board to complete the design for a handheld medical order-entry system. By applying software engineering practices to interaction design, DDO resolved critical issues—from the large and conceptual to the detailed and screen-level—and discovered a new approach to design: Middle-Out.
[Beta] How do you design?
This book is not finished. We’ve been developing it over the past few years. It began as a manilla folder with copies of different process models. We completed the first “book” version as part of a project undertaken for Elaine Coleman and Sun’s Virtual Center for Innovation. We present this version for educational purposes only. We have obtained no permissions to reproduce any of the models. Copyrights remain with their owners.
If you know of any models which are not featured in this book, please feel free to share them with us.
The Information Loop
Written for CIO Insight Magazine magazine by Hugh Dubberly.
Industrial age companies increased efficiency through mass production. They also used the tools of mass production to talk to their customers, sending the same message to as many people as possible. But mass communication isn’t uniformly efficient. As John Wanamaker quipped, “I know half of my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.”
Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations
We collaborated with Michael Geoghegan, Paul Pangaro, and Peter Esmonde to produce a booklet for Sun about leadership and language.
Below are a few interior spreads. You can also download a PDF of the entire booklet.