When Designing, Don’t Forget to Design

There’s a growing problem with some digital design tools.

The Creation Process: Design & Production

To be aligned on the problem I have to present, we need to be aligned on the definitions of design and production and how they relate. Design is the process of solving problems through the organization of functional ideas. Once you’ve designed something, you know what you’re going to do; you can then produce it. So production is implementation of design. Put these two things together, maybe add a little inspiration to the front and you have the creation process.

Written out, these concepts might seem obvious, but the problem I’ve been noticing all around the industry of digital design is a lack of acknowledgement for these separate ideas, which in turn is hurting design.

The Problem

The problem with digital design tools are as follows: they either overlook the design step altogether and move right on to the production of pre-canned designs, or they constrain the ability to design so much that the most effective solution isn’t capable of being explored or created. Their tool or suite of tools are tailored to take an already specified type of media and produce it, quick, easy, just click, click, done. It sells, but it’s not design.

One industry where I have seen this in a grossly prevalent way is in instructional design. Learning Management Systems have become these behemoth platforms that sell themselves as a one-stop-shop for doing instructional design and getting that instruction out to users. Sounds great, but the problem here is that the products they provide produce content, they don’t provide tools that allow instructional designers to take ideas and apply them in ways that solve for a need. So instead of having a process step of “what’s the problem, and how should I best solve it?” they skip to, “let’s make a video, slideshow, interactive game.” I’m not saying those are bad things to produce, but how could you ever know you’re producing an effective solution for your need if you aren’t taking the time to consider audience, environment, problem, metrics, facts, assumptions, technical capabilities and content before you decide on the media to carry out your design?

Why is this happening?

One big factor for this problem is that we do both digital design and production on our computers which can often be perceived as a single tool, rather than making the distinction at the software level. Moreover, we have software that can do both, further blurring the line.

Another reason is that design itself is misunderstood. People, and more importantly, product companies mistake production for design, or design for the entire creation process, and fail to grasp how it really should be defined.

Last, and I think this is the biggest reason, is because design is hard. It is! The design part of the creation process is the hard part. Production can start off difficult or slow, but there are steps to follow to get from A to B, and it’s merely a matter of practice to master. Design, on the other hand, is synthesis; it’s the transformation of electrical impulses in your brain, or multiple brains, into original or modified concepts relative to a purpose, goal or need. And if you’re selling a design product, you don’t want it to be hard to use.

How do we fix this?

I think companies entrenched in the major design industries are already starting to course-correct. Adobe has been dabbling in products that are more geared towards expressing ideas and organizing them rather than tools meant to produce ideas, though I think there is still a potential for more, and their primary offerings can reinforce the blurriness between design and production.

For designers, I think it’s also about having and proliferating awareness around their own design processes and finding and supporting tools that help that process get more effective before production takes place.

Finally, I think education is also to blame here. Schools are putting a bigger emphasis on learning these production tools and diluting the need to allow students to find and develop their own design processes… maybe because it’s hard.