One design
Designers do more than what they think they do!
It was at the start of my first year at grad school that I coined the term ‘One design’ as an attempt to make concrete, my thoughts about design. For a long time, I have been unsure of what to call myself — an undergrad in industrial design (ID) made me an industrial designer, but I loved typography and branding and remember running between the product design and publication class during breaks, meant for communication design (CD) students. While my peers were engaging in ID vs. CD wars, I knew it cannot be that simple, but still took the ID side because well, I was in ID. I felt I was more than only an industrial designer and decided to do a masters in design at IIT Kanpur. I thought the generic degree (masters in design) with no specialization will let me explore the lengths and breadths of what design is and what role I play in design. To cut a long story short, it didn’t and I dropped out after the first semester. I decided to work at Human Factors International as a way to learn something else, something more in design. It was here where I was exposed to terms like Human Factors Specialist (my designation), Usability specialist (another designation used interchangeably with human factors specialist), User experience designer, User interface designer and Interaction designer. The years I spent there surely thought me something new, and something more generic than industrial design. However, as a result, I was more confused than ever what I was! I liked calling myself a Human Factors Specialist and thought it made me look intelligent and important, but not many understood who a human factors specialist was — a non user-friendly designation, and i wasn’t satisfied. More importantly, did it encompass everything I did as a designer? Nah!
Does the label really matter? No. This was by no means trying to label myself for use on my resume. It was more than that. I was trying to understand what I am and what I do/can do, and playing around with existing labels is a good starting point. I did a simple experiement. I tried grouping projects that I, and other well-known designers had worked on, into categories (User experience, Interaction design, Interface design, Industrial design, Service design and Communication design). I found that not a single project could be forced under only one category. I could not find an industrial design product that did not communicate something. Not a single interaction design project that did not play a role in the user’s experience. Every project could fit into multiple categories and many often than not, all the categories. This made something clear to me, these categories or labels or designations or whatever you want to call them, were falling short. This gave rise to * drumroll* *curtains rise* — One design.
One design is the practice of design which includes anything and everything design under the sun, or even on and beyond it!
The word ‘one design’ came from thinking about design as ONE big field. ONE big playground. ONE big container. All in ONE. However, the choice of word does not matter. My only hope is that it makes one curious, and more and more people ask me about it so that I can tell them how they have been doing much more than they thought they were. I could have called it anything — All design, Everything design or even A-Z design, and you are free to do so. What matters to me is the idea that it is impossible to be only an industrial designer, interaction design or a communication designer. Yes, you might be stronger at certain aspects than others and are free to pursue those, but that does not mean you can ignore everything else. In fact, I might be contradicting myself here, but I hate it when anyone uses ‘UX/UI’. in that form. They are simply NOT the same and cannot be used interchangeably. As Kshitiz Anand put’s it in his medium post, “Every time you use the term UI/UX, a pretty bird dies somewhere”. However, you cannot be doing one without influencing the other. Any user interface decision will impact the user experience and vice versa. It’s simply impossible to stay inside one single bucket. And that is because:
Design is simply complex and complexly simple.
I am writing this post four months into grad school, and the concept of one design has only become stronger in my head. It is funny how the brief for this post is to write about what I think interaction design is, and how I have refrained from doing that. It’s only because I cannot define interaction design without stepping on every other field of design that exists (same for any field within design). For time being, I am content how everything has conveniently fallen inside one design (and I can even use it on my resume). This does not mean I am a jack of all, but means I surely can participate and contribute to anything and everything design. Designer are (or should be) people who fit into any situation, any problem, any process, any field or any brief, and help move it forward. All hail One design!
Chirag Murthy
One designer.
