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Book Review: Systemisches Design
By , SAP AG – 05/11/2006
This review takes a personal look at Cyrus Dominik Khazaeli's book Systemisches Design. Please note that this book is written in German.
Book
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Cyrus D. Khazaeli Design: General |
Author
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Cyrus
Dominik Khazaeli is a Diplom Designer and Dozent at the FH Wedel, Germany.
He wrote several books, among others on typography and layout.
Review
Executive Summary
As the title Systemisches Design indicates, the book written by Cyrus Dominik Khazaeli takes a basic approach to the design activity as a systematic process. It provides, on the one hand, a sound collection of different models and theories for design activities like information, navigation, interaction and interface design. On the other hand, the book tries to focus more on the underlying procedure and structure of the creation process. Khazaeli demonstrates an innovative aspect by making the user/end consumer a central focus of his book and underlines his thoughts with many different real-life design examples and case studies.
Target Group
The book is intended for students, instructors, designers and researchers of interactive systems from such diverse backgrounds as computer science, psychology, industrial engineering, technical writing, communications and media, product design, graphic design, and education.
Discussion
Khazaeli introduces many different design activities like information, navigation, interaction and interface design in his book. Each of these design activities has a special knowledge background and toolset connected to it, but shows in its creation process the same structure. Therefore, the focus of the author is on the basics of paradigms, principles, and backgrounds of design processes. The analytical perspective reveals many different contributors until at the end of a creation process a final designed product is achieved.
In his book, Khazaeli tries to demonstrate a bridge between psychology and design on the one hand to sensitize the reader to an underlying substructure of design processes and their target groups (the user/end consumer), while on the other hand to enrich and enable his subsequent analysis with the focus and toolset of psychological models and theories.
Khazaeli tries to discover the common denominator between most different design disciplines like for example interaction design or visual design. Khazaeli achieves this with his interdisciplinary approach. He uses the psychological theories and models and puts them together with common design theories.
By executing this analytical method Khazaeli drills on the one hand with his analysis "into" the user and tries to apply a structure to understand the needs and motivations of a user, on the other hand he analytically deconstructs real designed objects, by showing many examples of designed objects. For Khazaeli this analytical view on designed objects shows the different contributing parts, which range from strategy, scope, skeleton, structure, and surface. The analysis succeeds in enabling him to show the reader a more holistic view of the design process and the results achieved. The book provides a solid understanding of the goals creation processes as a broad overview. By doing so, the trade-off is that it lacks the focus for the detail.
Conclusion
The book is definitely recommended for a collection on design theory. It provides a very good collection of common design theories and processes with their practical real application. It needs some detailed reading of the book to understand the full potential of the author's model of systematic design processes. Unfortunately, the layout of the book shows a progressive style which does not make it an easy read. By combining many different 'text layers' (that is, explanation texts, comments, hints, golden rules, and so on) it becomes even harder for a reader to follow the main text and turns the book more into a dictionary on different design techniques and models. In my personal opinion, the attractive layout which is great for the book is rather disadvantageous here for the overall content. The bottom line is that the innovative interdisciplinary discussion approach makes it a valid investment for all libraries not only with interface design focus, but a design focus in general. Its advantage is the discussion focus on design processes, which is a subject that is often not well tackled in the literature available today.
