Design by numbers
The first year Product Design Engineering tutor at the Glasgow School of Art, Ben Craven, led a workshop with us the other week on quick calculations and the asset they can be. Back of a post-it note sort of calculations. Quick, crude, but really useful for checking ideas and claims. You can’t get definite numbers from them, but you can get rough sums that’ll let you know if something is possible or sensible.
An example Ben gave was when people claim ‘all our power should come from wind turbines’ without considering how many wind turbines that might be, and the effect that could have on the landscape (hint: a lot. I think the whole of Scotland would need to be entirely covered by thousands of wind turbines just to power the UK, and that’s not considering storing the energy somehow because of how inconsistent they supply it).
Another great sum Ben talked about was to do with putting too much water in your kettle. There was some sort of edict that went out to staff at GSA reminding them to not overfill the kettle in order to save energy. But GSA also run a course in Singapore, and they regularly fly staff out there. Ben wanted to see how many cups of tea you’d need to make in order to save as much energy as a single flight would use. It was in the order of tens of thousands. Filling kettles the right amount does save energy (and time spent waiting for your cuppa) but if you really want to be serious about the environment there are far more substantial changes we can make, such as flying less.
But this session got me thinking, how can quick calculations help us be better designers? Doing a few sums before you embark on a project can help you realise feasability. You can tell if your bridge will hold up whatever needs to travel over it, or the battery life of your wearable technology. These are really useful sums just in terms of working out the constraints you are going to design to.
But we can also use more detailed maths as well as speedy sums. We can asses statistics to work out what our user wants. If 80% of 60+ year olds prefer blue to grey, then you might design your zimmerframe to be blue. Or consider Apple’s EarPods. They 3D scanned 100s of ears in order to find commonalities so they could create a form that would fit them all best. This is a great example of using maths and statistics for universal design.
Often as designers we are scared of maths. We fear that creativity will be sucked out of us by calcuators. I think we have this image of someone in a beige-coloured office cubicle plugging in numbers and hoping a product will come out. This can be a valid concern! Some (*cough cough*, engineers) fall into the trap of simply using equations and computer models to create the most efficient systems without considering what they might be like for the people who will use them. I’m not advocating this! We absolutely should consider the user, and consider aesthetics. There is also a place for thinking the unthinkable, and running with ideas that seem impossible. But it is also really important that we use maths to help us out. Not as our master, but as a useful tool that we can master in order to help us design the best solutions that will help people.
