Chasing The Chinese Dream — If You Can Define It : NPR →

At one of the country’s top universities, Peking University, students are enthusiastic about the concept of a Chinese dream, which they see as a unifying force, offering a better common future.

When asked about their own Chinese dreams, however, they respond with answers that are far more specific, more personal and — by insinuation — more critical of China’s developmental path.

“The air can be more clean and the environment can be better,” says Zhang Yiying.

Fellow student Cun Rui’s dream is “to find a good job and to realize my value.”

“Previously Chinese don’t have dreams, I think. For example, for students, they just follow their parents,” Cun says.

A Working Definition of Product Design →

fieldstudy:

photo by Alexey Bednij

For the past ~18 months, I’ve been working as a product designer. And I’ve spent that same 18 months trying to understand what that means. This an attempt to articulate, in the broadest sense, what it means to practice product design.

My product design work is the work I am most proud of, but it doesn’t anthologize or summarize well. Most of it goes unnoticed. It’s doesn’t manifest as discrete, blog-able units. It doesn’t Dribbble well. It’s broader than wireframes or UI or screenshots. If a product were a house, it wouldn’t be the interiors, or the frame, or even the foundation. It would be the reason for the house, the motivation for the house, and the idea of what the house could be and the purpose it could serve. Product Design is formless.

I put a lot of time into brand, UI, UX, etc. But those all feel like they are at the periphery of what I do. Those skills exist in the execution layer and support the product, but without solid product thinking, they are baseless.

A year-and-a-half’s worth of thinking (and plenty of stammering through my explanation of why I left behind a more comprehensible design career) has landed me on this working definition of what it means to be a product designer. Here goes…

Product Design is…

Damn You Art School →