bplusd

Advocating for greater design maturity can be frustrating - it seems that design will perenially be pigeonholed as the craft of making things pretty. This morning I’ve spent some time thinking about the root causes that lead to design being boxed in, and I’ve come up with a couple ideas. I’d like to hear more thoughts, so let me know in the comments.

Despite my love-hate relationship with design as a profession, this post isn’t about the failings of the profession to move beyond style, form, and function. I think that disciplinary failure to stretch is fuelled by the same fundamental causes.

First hypothesis: the design of surface elements acts as a prototypical category for design as a whole. Now, this isn’t the kind of prototyping that we’re usually talking about in design conversations. Prototype theory suggests that some members of a category are more representative of the category than others - when you think of a bird, you’re far more likely to conjure an image of a robin or a seagull than a cassowary. When people think of design, they are far more likely to think of surface elements like color and styling rather than deeper characteristics like function, problem solving, or problem definition. We literally judge books by their covers, at least at first. The same holds true for cell phones, toys, cars, websites, and other designed objects.

The reason that surface characteristics have stronger association with the category is because they are more salient — because they are easier to observe and experience, people have far more frequent exposure to these elements. The concrete nature of surface elements, and the frequency of experience are what conspire to create a prototypical category.

The consequence of design-as-style occupying the prototypical position for ‘design’ in our language and thinking is that other design practices have to overcome this cultural and cognitive inertia. Before we can have a conversation about design-as-problem-solving, we need to acknowledge and work from the prototypical category - extending from the current surface understanding of design to a more powerful and holistic perspective.

Second hypothesis: the volume of professional work across levels of design maturity means that there is relatively little framing and problem solving compared to style, form, and function. There’s more demand for work at the surface levels, because people want their wastepaper basket in a dozen different carefully curated Pantones, but don’t need a dozen rethinkings of waste and consumption.

Usable output is the pragmatic yardstick for problem solving and framing, and these conceptual practices need to lead to practical solutions before any real value can be realized. Good problem definition and solution often leads to lots of demand for designing function, form, and style. With more activity at these surface levels, the industry reinforces the prototypical characterization of design as a surface practice.

The real question is so what? What’s the point of talking about prototype theory and demand for industry services (and the corresponding volume of work, practitioners, and professional conversations). Well, for me I have a couple takeaways: realizing that we’re dealing with a prototype effect means that there’s specific communication strategies to adopt. Realizing the volume of work is a major contributor to that prototype effect means that there’s implications for spreading design maturity in the profession. Finally, there’s the basis for a more rigorous understanding of where design is coming from, and hopefully that helps us better shape where it’s going.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.