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Why this blog?
Firstly this blog is here to force myself to order my own thoughts, to enable myself to exist in time if you wish. Foucault wrote more on this). A secondary goal is to become more able in both the structuring of thoughts and the use of English.

Why this blog
One more the question now not focussing on ‘why to blog’ but why especially this particular blog and not one of the many I created before. This blog exist to order a certain category of my thoughts; those on design. I already mentioned that I know that defining a concept like design is a endless and lengthy process, so for now I will accept that design is a vaguly descriptive container therm. Though for my own good, and for you dear reader, I will write down some buzzwords that I’m planning to focus on: user experience design, interaction design, emotional design, user centric design and usabillity. I know all these concepts are pretty trendy at the moment, but I do believe that they are trendy for a good reason, their names might change in the future (for example calling emotional design; neuro design, might get the emo out and the money in) but their basic concepts will stay. In the end design exist for no other reason than to serve the world. I thought about saying serve humans, but I think that good design goes beyond only serving human goals.

So now you know, this blog is here to enable myself to work with design related questions and answer on the area of user centred software design. Where software will in most cases be browser bases web applications, but I don’t see a good reason to narrow it down so much.

A vision on design:
At the moment I’m working on what I personally think is the best approach to design. I like to structure things in a pyramid approach, first the most abstract questions and than farther down towards the practical questions. To start at the top, first question should be, what is it that I/you/ user wants from life? In most cases the answer will be somewhere around the lines of the ‘pursuit of happiness‘ From thereon I guess the next question is, how do you think you will achieve that (or maintain this), I have some problems here in running out of the exact terms, but I guess this step would be called ‘visions’ where do you envision yourself in the next 5 years. Than these visions can be broken down in goals, for example to stay happy for the next 5 years, I need a house, a partner and a job. These are the most abstract forms of goals, designers can already start working on supplying tools for those goals, but they will mainly be focusses on certain decisive moments in life. More practical it might be to focus on goals that are more stable, let’s take a happy capitalist goal of ‘I want my business to exist next year’. This goal can than be questioned; what do you need to have your business exist next year? I need 5% more customers. From this point I shall start to call it sub-goals (by lack of a better word), what do I need to do to get 5% more customers, I might need to have more people know about my product. Than how can I achieve this. From here on we can define tasks; How do I reach that many people that I can expect a raise of 5% of my business. You might want to communicate about your business on a website. Than to be able to perform your task of promoting your business on a website, this website should offer you certain tools to do this, the sub-tasks. As you can also see the more practical you get the more you get in to contemporary craziness, whilst far on the top you will answers that have been the same for millennia.

Summary
Design should support reaching goals. Goals relate to visions and subtasks as:
Vision - Goal - sub-goal - task - sub-task

On this blog I will focus on how design can help people to reach goals by using (web based) software. There are of course endless other ways to achieve goals just as easy or a lot better, but I’ll let that up to other people.

Two visions on User Experience Design:
Peter Morville from Semantic Studios created this one, which tries to answer the question ‘what is good design‘

Jesse James Garet from Adaptive Path created this one, that tries to answer the questions ‘how do we create good design’

What both diagrams miss though, is the answer on why to design in the first place. Well I think I answered my question.