EDITOR Hugh Dubberly hugh@dubberly.com

Learning Curves for Design
Hugh Dubberly

Dubberly Design Office | hugh@dubberly.com

When businesspeople discuss growth, they often refer to S-curves or “hockey sticks”—diagrams depicting quantity changing over time, typically units sold per month or quarter. Growth begins slowly and gradually increases to an inflection point; from there it accelerates. Eventually, growth begins to slow and tapers off, for instance, as a market saturates or a system stabilizes at a new level.

S-curves may look backward (tracking progress, adoption, or consumption) or forward (projecting growth). In the early days of Google, cofounder Sergey Brin began tracking search queries per day and maintaining a graph, which grew to fill the wall of a stairwell in the original Google building.

Quality

Nicholas Felton has a wonderful graph showing the rates of adoption of various home appliances and electronic devices [ 1]. Each curve is a successive wave of technology: flatter curves for early technologies and steeper curves for more recent ones, suggesting adoption rates have increased.

For startup companies, the dream is to catch a technology or market just as the “hockey stick” turns from blade to handle and ride the curve all the way up—or at least to a successful IPO.

What do S-curves have to do with design?

S-curves can also represent learning. Through study and practice, learning increases over time, describing a learning curve. Learning curves may represent a designer acquiring knowledge and skills, starting slowly, picking up speed, and leveling off as the designer reaches proficiency. Likewise, learning curves may represent an organization growing or maturing.

Design comprises many domains (e.g., design of environments, objects, and messages); in turn, each domain comprises many skills (e.g., typography, grid-system development, and data visualization). The skills required to practice effectively within even one design domain can change, particularly as means of production or communication change (e.g., as personal computers became pervasive in the workplace) or as the context of practice changes (e.g., as the Internet became a channel for

Progress

Time (Investment)

 S-curves describe change over time, often units sold or projected to be sold.

[ 1] Nicholas Felton Diagram in “You Are What You Spend,” New York Times 10 February 2008. See: http:// graphics8.nytimes.com/ images/2008/02/10/ opinion/ 10chart.large.gif

providing services). From time to time, new design domains also emerge (e.g., interaction design and service design).

In a time of change, individual designers can ensure that they remain competitive by regularly reviewing the skills needed to practice in their chosen domains and by regularly assessing their proficiency in required skills. For example, have CSS and Flash programming become required skills for people beginning to practice interaction design? What about experience with the Processing programming language or with the Arduino platform?

Likewise, organizations can ensure that they remain competitive by regularly reviewing the design domains that affect their ability to develop new products. For example, are new skills needed to stay competitive in existing design domains? Have new design domains begun to emerge, demanding new skills? Is there a risk of falling behind? Are there opportunities to step ahead of competitors—to differentiate the organization and its products?