I’ve been asked about my domain and blog name. So let’s try to tackle that.
The JLH part is no large mystery, those are my initials.
The design part is a bit more complicated. I chose that based on its the defining word for everything I have ever done, succeeded, failed, or attempted in my life. I suppose there’s also an existensial meaning behind it as well. From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential, Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individual’s experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. The philosophy generally reflects a belief in freedom and accepts the consequences of individual actions, while acknowledging the responsibility attendant to the making of choices. It’s easy to view the scientific observances of cause and effect and believe you understand the world, but if within those details you discover the design you have truly understood the meaning.
For me design is a process, a unique one, that not all people are capable of. There is the artistic design which combines creativity with personal expression, I have little talent in this field. There is also layout design which has more to do with spatial relationships as seen in such fields as graphics design, architecture, interior design, landscaping, etc. I’m impressed with people that can do such things, but again I have no interest in this.
I must say that I have done work as a designer in the HVAC industry and in process design, mainly with heat transfer and controls.
For me the design process is used daily in work and lifelong in living. The design starts with the final product, or at least the initial notion of it. This may be a project goal, a sales goal, a marketing plan, a piece of furniture, or a business model. You have to know what you want to achieve until before you can design a way to attain those goals. I find that not having clearly defined end goal is usually the failure of most designs. Most good designers end up in the end with what they wanted from the beginning, the great designers have clearly laid out their goals before it even began. That’s the easy part.
The fun part is figuring out how you are going to attain those goals. This is the education experience, the time of discovery. When you take stock of your current assets and abilities and figure out what you don’t have and how you can get it. This is generally a time of a lot of reading, interviews, writing, and trial and error. For example when I decided I wanted to design furniture, this is the couple of years I took learning the tools of the trade, working with material, understanding the methods. When I wanted to start an online business I already knew all that there was to know with the HVAC market in which we went into, however I didn’t know a thing about HTML, shopping carts, web design, SEO, etc. I spent 6 months of research before the first page was published. Three months later we had 18,000 pages in the google index and were doing $50,000 a month in business. When an idea came up at work for a better lead/lag control system, the control theory was the easy part, for me I had to learn how to program a PLC.
The hard part is actually doing the work. The good thing is that the hard part is also usually the shortest duration of the process. If you start with well thought out design and clear directions the work can usually be delegated, any my role becomes more supervisorily in nature.
Within those brief descriptions you can see my grand plan. For me to succeed at anything I need to know it inside and out. How the sausage is made. I can’t tell a drafter how to lay out a drawing without first knowing how the drafting system works, its limitation, its possibilities. I cannot sell a product to someone without knowing how it works, how its made, or how the competition makes theirs. I need to know how its used, the processes it benefits, the applications its effective or ineffective.
I’ve got 12 domains online at the time of this writing but most are commercial in nature, this is personal. The internet is great opportunity that still exists for designers of all types. Designing a website requires a little technical knowledge, a lot of intuition, but most importantly a unique understanding on a topic.
more later.
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