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Potagia Magic
If you are a designer this situation will be familiar to you: an office colleague gets up for coffee and when he passes behind your chair he stands behind you looking at your monitor. “Oh, I'm sorry to bother you, but it just seems like magic to me what you do.”
Magic (from Latin magic, derived from the Greek μαγεία, probably from Old Persian, the same meaning as in English. magush, containing the root magh-: «to be able», «to have power»; referring to the ancient Persian priestly caste) is the art by which, through knowledge and practice, one seeks to produce results contrary to known natural laws by means of certain acts or words.
For those who do not work with visual elements, The activity of design and everything developed with the plastic arts is very attractive, as if it were an innate gift inaccessible to some people, who do not understand the mental processes behind the practice of design, they only see the final “trick”.
Jared Spool has been drawing parallels between magic and user experience design for years, most probably influenced by his son reed, with whom he recently gave a talk at IDEA 2010; The Best is the Enemy of the Good, where he talked about the similarities between learning magic and experience design. In the corresponding podcast on Johnny Holland commented something like this: “When you want to do magic the first trick always comes out awful, and then when you think you know something, you compare yourself with other magicians and you feel you are the worst.”.
“What you may not realize, however, is professional magic has a hundred year jump on experience design. That field's drive for perfection started before the time of Houdini, in the late 1800s. The methods, philosophies, and culture behind their drive has gone through many years of refinement and maturation. There's a lot that today's experience designers can learn from how professional magicians approach their craft.”
If you are dedicated to this you will know that you were not born learning to design, perhaps at an early age someone told you that you could draw well (and you believed it), and that motivation served you as a spur to continue practicing, or perhaps your interest was awakened later, but you had to practice, copy others, read a lot to justify your decisions and make mistakes many times until you reached what you know now, moreover, today you have the feeling that you still know less than when you started and that you still have a lot to learn.
“To say I'm at that fourth level for everything I do would be completely wrong. As the great Robert Heinlein would say, ‘I am only an egg”.
Working with the mental models, altering the perception and make enjoy to the viewer of the experience are tricks of the magician's trade. The same techniques that designers use to create illusions in products.
When performing magic, you have to separate the spectator's mental model from the magician's mental model. Only the magician understands everything that happens through his point of view (whether it is a game of mirrors, or a matter of speed with the hands). In this sense, designers can define mental models that alter the perception of events. For example, a simple design “trick” (a progress bar, providing data sequentially) can accelerate the perceived speed of system response.
A magician must also be a great storyteller, master the art of storytelling, control the climax during the trick, just as user experience designers do with an app (that shopping cart climax).
Magic is in fashion lately, perhaps because of the excess of “reality” that surrounds us. Just the other day, some children in the street shouted at me “Look, Harry Potter as a grown-up!”. What more could I want, I only know how to do a couple of tricks...