The Noble Truths of Design
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Despite what you may have heard, design is NOT about making things look “pretty.” And chances are you’ve gotten you a dirty look if you’ve ever handed a designer something at the 11th hour and said, “Make this look good.” Thats like handing a baker a half-baked cake and telling them to put the icing on it. Design is not the final product or image, it’s a process. One of discovery, experimentation and ultimately implementation. It requires a certain state of focused relaxedness, and hard working play to be able to explore ideas, synthesize data, and ultimately create something meaningful. But like our cake example above, whats the point in a pretty cake that tastes like sh*t?
Ponder this Zen poem for a minute:
Beauty and ugliness have one origin.
Name beauty, and ugliness is.
Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.Is and is not produce one another.
The difficult is born in the easy,
long is defined by short, the high by the low.
Instrument and voice achieve one harmony.
Before and after have places.That is why the sage can act without effort
and teach without words,
nurture things without possessing them,
and accomplish things without expecting merit:only one who makes no attempt to possess it
cannot lose it.The Poetry of Zen — By J. P. Seaton, Sam Hamill
Deep huh? But seriously, if you think about the fact that we live in a world where this is defined by that, light by dark, good by bad, you can begin to see the subjective nature of our opinions. By deeming one thing good, we must by necessity deem another thing bad. By labelling one thing as pretty we must label another as ugly. But who gets to apply these labels?
We have to learn to move beyond subjective labels and begin to look at our objective objectives. What are our goals? What are the desired outcomes that we are looking for? Then we have to set a strategy for achieving those goals and outcomes.
I would like to propose some fundamental “noble truths” of design, inspired by the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
The First Noble Truth: Life is suffering (but design shouldn’t be)
We all face challenges in our lives, some big, some small. Good design should make dealing with those challenges easier or more enjoyable, or at least more efficient. I mean, who wants to spend time doing things they don’t want to?
Design should take away suffering, not add to it. We all have experience with bad designs that cause frustration or confusion. Decisions made for the sake of aesthetics (or a lack thereof) that make the entire experience painful. Think of bad websites, bad roads, poorly written instructions, and products that don’t work at all like you think they should (need I remind you of the universal remote?).
It is absolutely, unequivocally imperative to keep your end user front and center in your mind the whole time you are designing. When you believe you know the answer to someone else’s problem without talking to them you are acting based off of assumptions. And we all know what it means to assume.But if you can step back, and allow your users to show you their “suffering” you can better understand the challenges they face, and be better equipped to solve them.
There is a huge difference between an insight and an assumption. An insight is taken from data, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative, and based on a pool of information or collected experiences. Imagine dipping a bucket into a well and pulling out water, the bucket is your insight, the well is your data. An assumption, is when you think that if you put a bucket in that well you will get water, but you never actually do it (who knows, that well might have been long dry).
The Second Noble Truth: The Origin Of Suffering Is Attachment
One of the challenges of designing is when people get stuck on an idea or solution, and fortunately (or unfortunately) it makes sense when you think about it. Few people spend as much time coming up with and throwing out ideas as professional creatives. While we may have ideas that we favor more than others, ultimately we have learned to detach ourselves from our ideas at the beginning of the process so as to allow for objective quantity to trump our subjective quality. So it is perfectly reasonable for anyone outside of these fields to view their ideas with a sense of personal attachment, and view any critique of those ideas as an attack on them personally.
These preconceived notions, or ideas, hinder the design process by blocking off our minds to potentially better, or at least novel, solutions. They can cause arguments and tensions among the team, and even go so far as to cloud what the actual problem is!
When you have defined a solution under the belief that you have identified a challenge or problem you have cut off all real ability for a creative new solution. What I mean by that is that sometimes we have a tendency to pose an answer as a question. It’s the difference between, “How might we design a website where people can buy clothes?” versus “How might we create an experience where people can shop on their own terms?” In the first example you have set up a binary equation where any ideas that are not exactly the idea that was set down at the beginning are wrong. Anything that is not a website is no longer an acceptable answer, therefore you have defined the answer before the question.
The Third Noble Truth: You need to let go, to get a grip
Letting go of preconceived notions isn’t easy. We’ve developed our beliefs and ideas over time, based on our experiences. Some experiences hold more weight than others, some of which hold more weight than they deserve. If you think about how much we are bombarded by the opinions and and images of the media and the people we know, it can be easy to become persuaded to a particular belief or point of view. Becoming attached to these ideas can be detrimental. When designing it is important to practice non-attachment. Ideas change with every new incoming piece of information, and so too will the designs themselves change.
Learning to empty your mind isn’t some new age thing where you’re communing with the universe (although, if you do, then good on you!). It is simply an act of removing the mental baggage we’ve collected and clarifying our thoughts to view an issue in a new light. It is easy for designers to get caught up on trends, and for clients to get caught up on their new initiatives. But if we take a minute at the beginning of each new project to take what is called “a beginners mind” we can look at problems fresh, and maybe even ask if we are asking the right question.
We live in a world of rules, and heuristics. And for the most part these can be very helpful in guiding our decisions in a complex world. But there are times when adhering blindly to the rules can cloud our judgement rather than clarify. Rules can get us stuck in that dreaded proverbial box that all those famous thinkers are renowned for getting outside of. Imagine if you lived in a world where you could make the rules, apart from the expectations and norms of our current society.
The Fourth Noble Truth: The path forward isn’t always a straight line
We all know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but what we don’t know is what we miss by not exploring the side roads. Design is a constant act of discovery, one decision leads to the next in a series of logical creative steps. However, those steps don’t always lead to a final product. Sometimes they lead to a dead end, but you can still take everything you’ve learned and apply it to the next idea. To quote the over-quoted quote by Thomas Edison (if he even said this), “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Once we accept the fact that the road to success is a twisty one with lots of dead-ends and u-turns we can start to embrace the creative process. You can start to build in this exploration and experimentation into your process and allow for ideas that won’t, don’t, can’t and shouldn’t work.
I will leave you with this: designing is a lot like the martial arts in that there are many styles and many schools of thought, but it is only through learning when, where, and how to apply the various schools that one is best prepared for anything they might encounter.
Andrew Lebowitz is the Director of Brand Strategy for #VetsWhoCode, a non-profit organization training veterans how to code and helping to fill the skills gap in the tech sector. To learn more visit vetswhocode.io, to help support #VetsWhoCode click on the donate button below.
