De Angela's 25 Learning Tenets

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” ~Roy Disney

1 Have A Goal

“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.” ~Henry David Thoreau

This is also Donald Norman’s 1st stage of his 7 steps of action. A strong, articulated concept streamlines the time, energy, and resources put into a project. I find that the success of any project rests largely on how clear and developed the original concept is.

"Start With Why." ~Simon Sinek

I encourage you to also identify your motivation for completion. You need to be clear on why you are doing the project. What value will you get and give? When the process gets bumpy or rough as it often does, your project’s purpose and value can keep you focused and on target.

2 Commit

The intent to act is Donald Norman’s 2nd stage of action. You must be committed to the process AND be committed to finishing.

3 Be Fearless (AKA Dig In, Play, and Have Fun)

4 (For Those Of You Who Are Afraid Of Failing) Fail Quick

(AKA Do The Crappy First Draft (paraphrasing writer Anne Lamott here). It Won’t Be The Final Draft.)

(AKA Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Poorly) (AKA Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing, Period!)

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

Don’t procrastinate. Don’t allow the fear of failure to paralyze you to the point of inaction. Failure means you actually took action. Action is always better than inaction. Ultimately, failure is feedback.

5 Do Something

“Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.” – Chuck Close

Some subscribe to the notion of inspiration to propel a project, but I push inquiry and an iterative process, a delightful discipline of “working through” a project.

6 It Does Not Have To Be Perfect; It Just Has To Be.

You may feel that it is crap, but at the very least, one person will think it is a masterpiece, and nine times out of ten more than one person will think so. Seek comfort in that.

7 Show Up

“Is it good enough for Quentin [Tarantino]?“ –Robert Rodriguez (in response to possible competition from Tarantino for their double feature, Grindhouse)

First of all, show up for yourself. By “showing up” I mean put all that you got into whatever you are doing. And if that doesn’t work for you, then at least show up for your classmates. Your presence and participation not only affect the quality of your education but your classmates’ as well. You do affect the people you interact with on a daily / weekly basis.

8 Don’t Worry About What Other Folks Are Doing (AKA Worry About What You Are Or Are Not Doing)

“You will never come up against a greater adversary than your own potential, my young friend.” ~Michael Piller & Michael Wagner, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Evolution,” Dr. Paul Stubbs to Wesley Crusher, original airdate 25 Sept. 1989, stardate 43,125.8

9 Learn How To Learn (AKA You Learn How To Do Something By Doing It)

“If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.” ~George Bernard Shaw

One of my main goals is to get you to learn how to learn by utilizing all of your available resources. Don’t be a victim of learned and taught helplessness (coined by Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things). Be proactive. You are a smart, intelligent, curious being. Learning is an active, participatory process. We learn by doing.

10 Use Your Resources

"I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school."

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.

~Ray Bradbury, "The Art of Fiction No. 203." Interviewed by Sam Weller.

• Libraries, Books, & Magazines

• The Internet and its Many Online Forums & Tutorials

• Blogs & Portals

• Meetups, Hackathons, Game Jams & Conferences

• Your Personal Network of Real People (like your classmates)

It is absolutely extraordinary how, if you can formulate a good search query, Google usually provides an answer to your questions within the first 3 to 4 entries.

11 Collaborate

Take advantage of the wonderful communities you are a part of at NYU and throughout NYC. You don’t have to do every single thing yourself. Instead, I encourage collaboration with other students to generate assets for your projects and to form a community / network for your future projects and life goals.

12 Research (Or Discover Or Explore For Those Of You Who Think Research Is A Dirty Verb)

During the research phase, I emphasize solidifying the concept / theme of your project through brainstorming, sketching, and design research. In addition, research allows you to view your project within a social, cultural, and historical context. It's also important to consider who you are designing for? Who is your audience?

• What are you trying to say or communicate?

• And who will care?

13 Map Your Ideas

“Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.” ~Winston Churchill or Dwight Eisenhower (There’s some confusion over who originated this quote.)

To get to your destination, you should utilize maps for your project. At the same time, if you see a fork in the road, I encourage you to pick it up. In other words, your plans could change throughout the process as you have epiphanies and insights, but until you see a better road, stay on your planned path.

Possible mappings are sketches, word lists, thought maps, clickthrus, storyboards, user experience scenarios, flowcharts, schematics, scripts, user workflow charts, etc. You should decide which ones are most appropriate for your project. Some projects may require more than one.

14 Consider All Aspects of the Design

“Be consistently consistent or consistently inconsistent.” ~De Angela L. Duff

During the design phase, the concept is solidified by shaping and molding the project's content.

Many facets of design come into play:

• information design (How will the tone and display of the actual content impart meaning?)

• interactive design (How will it function? What are the best authoring tools for specific tasks?)

• visual design (How will it look?)

• sound design (How will the sound or sound effects affect the mood?), and

• user experience design (How will all of these elements come together for the user?).

15 Evaluate, Reflect, Iterate

Repeat this cycle ad nauseam until you have reached your original or revised goal. I encourage the iterative process by building a series of complete drafts as quickly as humanly possible. I subscribe to parts of Basecamp’s Getting Real philosophy: start small by communicating the core concept (aka the epicenter) and add depth and detail later through iteration. Sometimes clarity only comes through doing. This process of iteration can lead to a project’s polish and craft. When there is a synergy between concept and craft, the project often distinguishes itself from others.

16 Get And Give Feedback During Critiques (AKA Don’t Take Things Personally)

“It is better to be looked over than overlooked.” – Mae West

Any feedback, positive or negative, is good feedback. Think of the alternative: Silence.

Feedback is the most valuable part of your education. You can easily know whether or not you know how to use a piece of software, but how can you tell that the work that you are creating is effective and impactful? Don’t design in a vacuum.

Class critique is an integral part of the process throughout each phase and can constantly inform your project if you allow it to do so. In addition, by critiquing others, you can have insight into your own work.

However, equally important is learning how to listen and respond to criticism, separating, evaluating, and even rejecting conflicting criticism. The critique process inevitably leads to reiterating and refining the concept and other parts of the design.

17 Keep The Big Picture And Deadline In Mind

I will often remind you to think of the forest–the big picture–and not to get hung up on one tree or one detail of the project. A rough draft of a complete, developed idea communicates much more effectively than polished pieces of a project.

18 Always Remember That There Is Always More Than One Way To Do Something

There is never one “right” way to do something. Sometimes “hacking” get the job done just as well as an “elegant” solution. When deadlines are involved, and you need to get things done, “by any means necessary” may drive your actions.

In a similar vein, don’t rely exclusively on technology. Get off of the computer sometimes. A haptic process could make your project stand out from your peers. Technology is simply a tool. You are the creator.

19 Ask Questions / Speak Up / Speak Out (AKA Don’t Make Assumptions)

There is no such thing as a stupid question, but I beg of you to ask questions sooner rather than later, and definitely, BEFORE THE DAY something is due.

20 Spellcheck

Just do it! Grammarly and other built-in spellcheck tools are awesome. Take advantage of them. A former coworker of mine sent an email to her boss, and she forgot to include the “o” in hello.

21 Read Out Loud Verbatim Any Written Communication Before You Distribute It

I must emphasize the word verbatim (aka word for word). The word you think you have included may be missing.

22 Don’t Read Your Presentations

Engage and interact with your audience. Use the visuals in your presentation as cues to what you should be talking about.

23 Project Your Voice When Delivering A Presentation In Person

Remember the folks in the back of the room need to hear you, too.

24 Communicate Clearly And Concisely (AKA Read Strunk And White’s Elements Of Style)

Develop your written and verbal communication skills through communicating your ideas clearly and concisely when documenting your work, delivering a presentation, and/or participating in a critique.

25 Ultimately What You Get Out Of Something Is What You Put Into It; Do Your Best

“So what you do, it’s up to you. It’s up to you, what you do. It’s up to you. It’s up to you.” ~Slum Village

Ideally, the overall creative process will empower you to inform, persuade, enrich, and ultimately change society and culture. At the end of the day, I hope my teaching inspires you to learn, create, lead, and contribute through the intersection of design, art, and technology.