Design is often spoken of as being a nascent field. This claim in my observation is made in reference to a myopic definition of the design practice. Design has always existed in theory and practice. From the time we began to devise uses for animal bones, rocks and metals to our current obsession with making “breakthrough innovations”, design has been a constant.
The practice of design is an ancient ghost. It is a practice that is infused with creative thought, methodical construction and elegant presentation. Over the years, we have developed a series of criteria that qualify something as being “designed”. Some of these qualities and criteria include -
User Centric
User/ Market Research
Employing Design Thinking methods and the design process
The following parts of this post seek to break down each of these constructs and expose how they have polluted the design practice into an effortlessly replicable formula.
I. User Centric
The concept of “user-centrism” in design was popularized, involuntarily, by the Bauhaus and the modernist movements. Abstracting design as the creation of easily usable objects, graphics and systems, has lead to the standard belief that design has to be functional and must revolve around the “user”. However, defining design as the creation with intended functional purpose is one-dimensional and pigeon-holes design into a very rigid framework. Design can be practiced with any number of purposes - advocacy, contest, reformation, refinement and experiment are some of the approaches one could take to design (Parsons, Thinking: Objects, 2009). There is a shifting tide in the design practice from the Dieter Rams and IDEO user-centrism to the post-modern broader spectra of approaches by designers like OS∆OOS, Random International and Mischer’Traxler. A common rebuttal to this statement is often, “Well... that’s more Art than Design.” The primary distinction between Art and Design is not motivation or purpose but it is that Art is an expressive creative practice while design is a carefully crafted commentary that connects to us without the necessity to adopt external points of view. In that stead, design is “people centric” and not necessarily “user centric”.
II. User/Market Research
The compulsive requirement for the design practice to involve direct “primary” research stems from the illusion that the result of a design project is meant for “someone”, professionally referred to as a “target user”. The genesis of this ideology comes from the time when design consultancies started to work with commercial companies, and needed to involve “making money for the client” as an agenda of the design solution. A couple of anomalies to this practice are
Conducting research on subjects and deriving a solution solely based on user research can limit the possibility of both reaching a wider audience or attracting a new audience. Doing so becomes either a happy accident or a conscious correction to the design solution, which, as Achille Castiglioni has pointed out, drives the excitement away from the creation and definitely erases any chances for novelty.
The direct contact “primary” research that often involves interviews and surveys makes the stupid assumption that firstly, people know what they want and secondly, that people are honest and aware of their behavioral patterns. The first assumption would make the job of a designer redundant - if people knew what they wanted or knew their problems, technological companies would have a flooded mail box of complaints and suggestions. The second assumption is one of the biggest fallacies of the data collection world. People always lie (Laurie, House, 2004 - 2012) and interestingly, this theory is supported (apart from the popular American sitcom) by psychology. As human beings, we are genetically disposed to have a true self - who we are - and a false self that is a defensive facade that we present in order to feign conformity to society (Winnicott, Vaknin, Kohut, 1960). As designers, if and when we take the stance to design for functionality, usability and profitability, we should seek to employ methods such as observation (Nelson, How to See, 1977) to abstract the reality of the situation.
III. Employing Design Thinking Methods and the Design Process
The design process is the key to a design practice. It is methodical, infused with convolutions and mutations by the designer himself/herself (Ryan, Design Issues - MIT, 1997). Today, consultancies and larger companies have deconstructed the design process to a series of steps - research, ideation, prototyping and production. While the motive to decode the design process (the democratization of design) is interesting, it has become a way that companies claim that they have involved “design” in their product/service development. The evidence of design in these scenarios are limited to a couple of slides on a presentation moving the design practice from a driving force to creation and development to a funny little footnote on corporate arses. The design process is not a series of steps that can be half-heartedly employed but a combination of the scientific method that seeks to explore and validate phenomenon through experimentation and the philosophical methodologies of semiotics, phenomenology, hermeneutics and empiricism (1 Bürdek, Design: History, Theory and Practice, 2005). All of these inherently subjective disciplines married with the subjectivity of the designer’s inherent values, biases and beliefs make the design process an elegantly complex construct that can be embraced only by experiencing the design solution.
The argument that this post seeks to make is that by devising inventive methods to make design an accessible and understandable practice, we have bastardised the elegance, plasticity and depth of an important practice. Arguably, this is a very personal point of view, which is a rebuttal to the most common epidemic of “a need to innovate” that our society is ridden with today. The english word design (noun and verb) - derived from the latin “designare” (verb) and “signum” (noun) - skews the manifestation of the design practice and the designed outcome (2 Flusser, On the word design: An etymological essay, 1995). We still face the same confusion with respect to every aspect of the word, what it means and how it is practiced.