Design is an Attitude Not a Process
What’s the biggest takeaway from your first semester at design school?
That’s the question I was given a week ago to reflect on. As it happens, it’s something that I’ve actually been thinking a lot about for a while.
When I joined the Interaction Design Master’s Program at the University of Colorado, I already had a lot of experience in the design world of mechanical engineering. I spent 6 years designing everything from light fixtures to commercial construction to nuclear waste containment systems. So, I thought I knew the design process pretty well, and it would just be a matter of applying it to people instead of machines.
At first, that’s sort of how it felt. We talked about prototyping, testing, and other expected topics, but as the semester progressed, I realized how much more complicated and interesting anthropocentric design was, more so even than I was hoping when I decided to change careers. In engineering, there were bedrock principles and equations to design around. If I wanted to know the coefficient of friction between coolant fluid and the aluminum piping surrounding it, there were mathematical formulas I could use to get an objectively correct answer.
It’s not the same way with people, though. There is no certainty or objectivity. There are principles and strategies and ideas that many people agree are good, or probably the best, or dumb to ignore, but far fewer things are proven. And this is what makes it so interesting. To make something good, and useful, and innovative, a certain kind of alchemy has to take place. It’s a combination of the design methodology of prototyping and refining I was already familiar with, along with a sort of ineffable, inscrutable spark of inspiration that comes from combining insights and ideas from totally disparate places.
When I started writing on design for class assignments, I struggled to come up with topics. The fields of UX and UI already had a lot of people talking about a lot of the same things. And many of them were written so authoritatively, it was intimidating to try to say something new or relevant on an established topic, especially as a student.
But once I turned my attention to the larger world in general as inspiration for design thinking, I suddenly had too many things I wanted to write about. I see design thinking manifesting in movies, religion, literature. Literally every aspect of our environment incorporates deliberate choices that have a substantial impact on how we receive the content or message. There’s currently a folder of bookmarks in my browser full of more links than I’m ever going to be able to go through.
And that’s what makes design so fascinating as an academic subject, not just a commercial one. When you’re trying to get at the root of a problem involving people, it’s not enough to just stop at a user interview. Psychology, neuroscience, history, art, biology, applied math, engineering — these are often all important components of the user experience, even if the designer doesn’t realize that’s where they got their rules of thumb. For a given challenge, a creative designer who asks penetrating questions can combine principles from many of these fields and more in arriving at a concept. And if they don’t, we get what most of the design world produces — identical apps that no one uses more than a handful of times.
Essentially, design is about making people happy in their environment. When you look at any modern technological product, that’s all it’s really trying to do on some level or another. And this is not a question with an answer — nobody knows how to make everyone else happy, let alone themselves. So it requires an inquisitive mind willing to do research and ask tough questions that might lead them down still more paths of research to arrive at something new and useful.
As designers, we’re essentially acting as gatekeepers for the emotional state of society. If all the design-able elements that make up a society are poor, society breaks down, and people are miserable. But if they’re designed well, society functions smoothly and people are happy.
But to get to those conclusions, it takes a shift in perspective, and the willingness to embrace research and the act of connecting aspects of the human experience from all different avenues. UX and UI with respect to modern technology are such new fields, it’s impossible for all possible relevant knowledge to have already been condensed and synthesized for use.
So for me, the biggest takeaway is this: design is an attitude, not a process. And the most important part of that attitude is a relentlessly questioning mind. Asking “why”, as much as possible, that’s what has been the basis for the most compelling examples of design that I’ve seen in our program. The guest speakers and case studies that have stood out the most to me over the semester seem to incorporate this attitude, and it lead them to answer questions that the rest of their industry weren’t even asking.
As I move on with the program and my career as a designer, I’m going to strive to embrace this attitude. I’m not sure we really need more designers doing the same things, anyway.
