Design is not Art — The Second Coming
As it seems that the first article did not convince everyone that design is not art, here is The Second Coming, after which if you are still not a believer I got some bad news for you.
Read the first “Design is not Art”, and be sure to check out some of the comments.
Let’s consider a rather large residential building. Some twenty floors and three elevators serving the people living there. It is a usual residential building. Most people living in this building have office jobs, and are 9-to-5ing it every day, give or take an hour.
This means that in the morning the building will begin to shed its citizens. To help facilitate this, the elevators can actually be programmed to help the migration.
In the morning times, one elevator can be all the way on the top floor (20th floor), one could be on the second third of the building (13th floor), and third one on the first third of the building(7th floor). People on the first two floors usually go by foot anyway.
This results in elevators always being really close to the people. When the elevator takes a person down to the ground floor, it automatically returns to an empty position above — 20th, 13th or 7th floor. It does not stay in the ground floor, because nobody is going up at that time. And even if someone is going up, the 7th floor elevator is rather quick to descend.
In the evening when people are returning home, two of the elevators could constantly be docked to the Ground floor, and third one could be positioned mid way in the building (say 10th floor). The first two would, as in the morning, when done with their job carrying people up automatically return to the ground floor and what is more could automatically open the doors as to visually show they are ready and to quicken the entry process. The third one is there just in case someone else in the building needs to move about, and being positioned in the middle would give rather quick access to all floors.
Of course, we could now figure out a behaviour for elevators during the day, after the majority left for work. Perhaps people move around the building (neighbors going for a lunch at each other’s). Perhaps maintenance needs to move about. This all could quickly be either found out through user research, or it could simply be monitored and a pattern could be established.
The system could over the course of time self-correct as well. Perhaps in the morning 20th, 13th or 7th floor is not optimal layout, perhaps there are more people closer to 14th floor so the scheme could change.
We could also tweak night time elevator position.
And perhaps in the evenings, the third elevators does not need to be half way up the building, maybe that one could automatically move to the ground floor as well to facilitate even faster migration to top floors.
And perhaps…
Do you see what we are doing here?
We have just designed (or at least tried to) a good User Experience of people living in a building regarding the elevators. We have shortened the travel time and we are talking about patterns of elevator use.
You could say now something like:
Hey mister, but I think having one elevator in the morning be on 20th floor is not good, it would be better if it was on 18th, because from there it is just a short jump to 19th and 20th, and once those floors are cleared, being on 18th is much more effective.
Good! Great! Let’s have a design conversation!
Can you identify what is the output of our design conversation? What is the tangible, observable artefact that came out from this? I mean, we made something. Obviously. Where is it?
Unless you count electrons and ones-and-zeros, there is none. We have designed a logic for elevators to work. Our design session’s output is invisible. There is no interface to this product we just made. No industrial design. No colours, no lines. No art. Just process. This is pure design.
People often associate design with visual beauty, but look at the example we made here. There is no tangible output.
Art as a rule has tangible output. Even music, the most invisible form of art (at least that I can think of right now) has some sort of tangible output. After all, you can feel that bass right in your lungs.
Design is not art. It is so much not an art, that design can exist yet have no visible or tangible artefact.
And what is more, as the technology around us is getting more and more miniaturised and invisibly built into objects around us, more and more of design will consist just of a logic and process, and less of a visible interface.
A good example for that is Nest Thermostat. Yes, it has visible interface and a rather pleasant industrial design. But once you set it up, the majority of User Experience that comes out from that product comes from invisible and well designed process. Nest observes what you do during the day, and during the week, learns your behaviour and then automatically sets the temperature according to learned patterns. There is no visible output of this design. Yet, something is happening. Users experience it.
Consider what Dropbox is. Yes, yes, you install it, you go through user interface to make an account, yes. But once you are done, what is Dropbox? You have a folder on your computer, there is (almost) nothing special about that folder. You put files in that folder. And then you go to your other computer (or iPad, iPhone, whatever…) and those files are there. Dropbox makes your files omnipresent. And who is the main culprit for this omnipresence? Yup, invisible little logic machine that does its magic in the background. Majority of what Dropbox is — is invisible.
I could go on and on with examples of invisible design. Layouts of supermarket that channel you from aisle to aisle. Car keys that unlock a car when user is at a certain (designed) proximity to the car…
Design is not art. Design solves problems. Design creates better life.
Design is how things work.
—Steve Jobs
Take a read at what happens when artists try to design web products — Ello: a design disaster.
