THE LAVENDER WAY

I am a designer. I design. I admire great designers. My youngest daughter is a designer but she does it for money whereas nowadays I do it purely for the fun and the satisfaction.

I used to do it for money But it is more fun, I find, to do it for its own sake.

I started off, professionally speaking, by designing program code - machine level code. And I found I was good at it. Designing code is an almost entirely abstract form of design. Mostly, the object of your design has no visible dimension because the object is a piece of code that runs inside a machine.

I covered form design for printouts and after some time I moved on to system design. Smallish systems at first. I started designing record layouts and file systems as well - eventually I was designing database schemata. None of these things had any real visual dimension. Most of them had no observable manifestation in the real world save a few side effects.

I took an odd side turning at this point and spent some time re-designing other people's work - tuning and streamlining already designed objects that did what they were supposed to but didn't do it either efficiently or well - code and database schemata. This was in the days when computational efficiency was key to systems effectiveness.

When I returned to systems design proper I worked on bigger and bigger systems and increasingly they were online systems and as such had proper interfaces with the user. I educated myself in human centred design and poured as much effort into the design of those human computer interfaces as to all the other elements. Green screens were a particular challenge but the graphic interface was alreeady a reality and in short order would be on its way into mainstream computing.