Good Design VS Significant Design
Aesthetics is highly prized in all of the fields of design. Beautiful places and products grace the glossy pages of magazines and win design awards. But aesthetics is subjective. To create some form of consensus designers are all taught the same set of rules or design principles. Design principles are the rock stars in the looks rule perspective. Focused is placed on how the product created adheres to them. Logic dictates that if the product follows the principles then it is good design.
However design principles are more like guidelines, or elements of a whole. They can be applied in different combinations and create different results. Like ingredients in a recipe, it’s not only what you have but also what you do with what you have that counts. Just because you picked up all of the items on the grocery list doesn’t mean the meal will taste good. Therefore design should not be judged based on an imposed checklist.
Donald Norman, who heads up the Nielson Norman consulting firm, theorized that design appeals to us on three levels: visceral, behavioral and reflective. The first level, visceral, is the attraction of appearance. This is often how design is judged. Looks good is good design. Frank Lloyd Wright designed amazing houses if you didn’t mind a leaky roof. The second level is behavioral and has to do with function. Here the focus is placed on users. Works well is good design. A car with 150,000 miles may still drive well, but I’m betting the paint job is questionable. The third level of appeal is reflective. It involves identity and self worth. We equate status with possession. Everyone wants that latest IPhone, etc… As if it will somehow make us a better person. Highly desired is good design. Even though these levels add more purpose to design, they alone don’t describe what design is capable of.
An industrial designer, Tuck Viemelster stated that “design is about two things: creating beauty and fulfilling our destiny as human to make things better”. I appreciate the idea that design is more than skin deep. Design has the power to create change. IA Collaborative, a design research and strategy firm, expanded this idea by calling design: an aspiration to create, our passion to help humankind, a strategy to effect change, and the desire to impact the world. This reflects the problem solving nature of design. Once a need has been discovered through research, typically observation and interviews, it can be solved through design. Or at least that’s the basic idea. This is a concept I can get behind. Good design is born with a purpose.
Another theory followed by innovators like Steve Jobs it that people don’t know what they need. Judging by the popularity of the latest technological innovations they may be right. Paula Antonelli, senior curator at MOMA, put it well “good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing”. Innovation is often seeing beyond what can be done today and envisioning what is not yet possible as though it were doable now. Good design anticipates. But seeing the future is not enough.
Design can be powerful. It can improve our condition, inspire our soul and rock our world. Design can also create disaster, warp our perspectives and fill our lives with empty possessions. Good design has the potential to be significant. It takes a combination of the design descriptors I’ve listed to create something truly remarkable. To me significant design has a life of its own for better or for worse. Examples include: internet, smart phone, Facebook and on demand. The internet didn’t just change the way we seek our knowledge, it taught us to value the search over the lesson. Admit it you’ve looked up something gotten your answer and thought of something else to look up just because you could. Smart phones allowed us to take our wired world everywhere while it quietly forced a codependency on us all. I know way too many people who touch their phones in the morning before their spouse. Facebook gave us millions of friends and a pension for oversharing. We create this brand of ourselves and strive to have our page match the ideal in our head. On demand enabled our TV habits and fueled the desire for instant gratification. As if our fast food culture needed encouragement to be more demanding.
Significant design is born as an idea, becomes adapted as a shared experience and exists in fluid ever-changing state. It changes the way we exist. Significant design doesn’t just alter the world we live in, it creates it.
