Musings on design
Things I’ve been thinking about lately in relation to design:
You can probably judge the strength of a design by looking at the ideas you didn’t use. If you used the first idea you came up with, you’re probably not creating the best work you can. Sometimes you have a Eureka moment, but mostly I think design is about experimentation, trial and error, and arriving at the best solution after exploring at least a few that didn’t work out quite right.
Design should be intentional. By this I mean that there should be a reason that the elements in your design are arranged the way they are. If I ask myself why that type is set that way, or that element is in that position, I should be able to answer that question. If I can’t I need to work on the design until I find a place for everything and an appropriate explanation for that placement. To me, there is no place for random or arbitrary in design. However small or seemingly insignificant, we make a lot of decisions as designers, and I think the attentiveness to those decisions is the most imporant factor in how successful a design is…
But the paradox of design is that is shouldn’t look intentional. It should look effortless. If you notice the decision of the designer, I think the decision was probably the wrong one. Things should just look, feel, function right. There’s value in design surprising people and doing unexpected things but I tend to dislike design that tries too hard, and value more those things that are designed that just work, visually, physically, experientially. Eric Heiman of Volume Design said in his talk at UC Davis that “design should be a facilitator.” I like this idea, and spend a lot of time trying to make this happen in my work.
I think research is important. This relates to the designing intentionally idea as well, because to do so you need to have something to guide the rationale for your decisions. Maybe its because I was a science major before I was a design major, but I spend a lot of time researching information for designs. I think this is because I want my projects, even though they are just for class, to be for real, and contain real information, and to be informed by that real information. I think designs are more meaningful if they have that basis in reality. I’d rather not put in a “Lorem impsem doler…” placeholder text if I can do the research and actually write the copy, because I think the visual design created around the real copy will be stronger. The last few exhibition design projects I’ve worked on, I’ve done probably about 6-8 hours of research for each. If I had to guess what most people in my classes spend on research I’d say probably an hour, definitely not more than two. I’m not saying that my way is better. In fact, I think in general my focus on rigorous research hurts me more than it helps me, because it leaves less time for the visual problem solving that I’m actually being graded on. Great research but poor visual execution isn’t good design either. Here I defer to John Maeda: you have to do both. I’m still working on that, and I’m hoping that as my last quarter in college winds down, I’m finding the willpower and the time to do both in some of these final projects, and that the result will be some of the best design I’ve done in my short career.
The most interesting and valuable thing about my design education to me is that design gives you a framework and set of principles to solve complex problems. These problems need not be problems of visual communication, product design, etc – I think design thinking can be applied to the biggest problems we face as a species and as a planet. One of the problems with our current system and way of living is that it grew uncontrollably and unintentionally – if we as a human race had sat down at the beginning of the industrial revolution and tried to design our future, it would NOT have included the poisoning and destruction of our only planet so thoroughly as the current system does. Let’s use design to create a better future. If design is about intention, lets redesign our future with the best of intentions, and hold ourselves that standard. Where we are right now is not the result of intention, but lack of foresight, lack of understanding the context and complex interactions of the systems involved – the kinds of things that designers are/should be really good at understanding. More than anything else, I think this is why I still believe that design has the power to change the world, and to be more than the creation of landfill and ephemera as many designers have lamented.
