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Why?
Regardless of your occupation, most people are faced with creative challenges every day. Whether you are a doctor, lawyer, accountant, teacher, or receptionist, your clothes, your presentations, your emails, are all expressions of your creativity. Design decisions seem to come naturally for some people, and strikes fear in others. To the fearful, design is mysterious. It comes from somewhere they don’t understand. Whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, design is a powerful tool. One worth understanding, appreciating, and using. These days, you don’t have to be a “designer” to make design decisions. However, you do need to be more design sensitive and mindful of what good design is.
In Richard Florida’s book “The Rise of the Creative Class”, he states:
“Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource. The numbers of people doing creative work has increased vastly over the past century and especially over the past two decades. In 1900, fewer than 10 percent of American workers were doing creative work – most worked on farms or in factories. By 1980, the figure was still less than 20 percent. But by the turn of the new century, the Creative Class included nearly a third of the workforce.”
“Still, we have not even begun to tap into our creative potential. Human creativity is a virtually limitless resource. Every human being is creative in some way. Each of us has creative potential that we love to exercise and that can be turned to valuable ends.”
In business, design is strategic. Quality alone is not enough anymore. The business world is looking for intelligent, creative, and design-oriented people to be difference makers. Businesses are focusing on creative products, systems, and services that do more with less. This is really all that separates one organization from another these days. Companies are beginning to preach design internally, not just to the design department, but to all employees. They are seeking those who care about design to elevate the company to the next level. If this is the case, then we should all strive to raise our design IQ and become much more knowledgeable about what design is, and how “good” design can be a differentiator. If your organization is not design focused, maybe it needs someone to champion this endeavor and show what real creativity can do.
No matter the product or system, when something works right, looks right, and feels right, it sparks an emotional connection. This emotional connection is a direct benefit to the bottom line of a business because it encourages repurchase, reuse and recommendation. Apple seems to come up in every discussion about design, and rightfully so. Apple’s release of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad continues to revolutionize the way we live and work. Apple has established itself as the “leader” in the industry and people are flocking to their products like desert people flock to water. People love this stuff. Even Microsoft knows that Apple is onto something because their operating system is getting closer and closer to mimicking Mac OS.
What is Design?
Many people don’t understand design. They confuse it with “style” and contribute it to making something “pretty”. They are often confused between Function design and Aesthetic design. They experience the function but SEE the Aesthetic. Not understanding the difference, they peg the designer as the Creative Misfit. They elevate the designer to elite status driven by ego, or reduce him to merely someone picking out color for the drapes. In either case, the designer is often the lofty thinker that is not taken seriously, and therefore the design is not taken seriously.
On the contrary, design is a big deal. And good design is a very big deal. Design is rational, functional and meaningful. Good design is intelligent, not haphazard. Simply put, “design” is solving a problem in a creative way. It does not have to be complicated. In fact, the best designs are usually the most un-complicated. To me, design is about stripping away everything that is not critically necessary and solving an everyday problem in the most simple and profound way.
Design is also value driven. It has value, and it creates value. It focuses on the user experience. Unlike artists, that have the creative license to follow their impulses and create whatever they want, designers are concerned about how their designs are used. Designers have to wrestle with questions of affordability, usability, need, etc. Designers must be aware of the end user, and good design must impact people’s lives, no matter how small.
At the beginning of the last century, two famous architects had dogmatic ideas about what good design was and each coined a phrase that still rings true today. The American architect Louis Sullivan coined the phrase “Form follows function” in 1896. This suggests that the form is only there to support the function. Function comes first and is the driver of the “thing.” Just like the shape of a car or the anatomy of the body, each piece is formed and in a particular place to support it’s function.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a German-American architect that used extreme clarity and simplicity to revolutionize architecture in the early 20th century. He coined the phrase “Less is More” and believed the best designs were minimal, and therefore powerful, because there was nothing to distract the true creation.
I guess the argument is: Do these ideas truly define good design? Well, consider something as basic as the paper clip. Who designed it? I don’t know. But it just works. It is a single wire curved into an elongated spiral. Others have made plastic paper clips in various colors or created a hybrid bookmark-paper clip, but these ideas don’t make the paper clip any better, they just make it different. The original design is still the best. It uses the least amount of material and solves the problem of holding loose items together without permanently attaching them. It’s function dictates it’s form and it is as minimal as possible. That’s it. Simple. Perfect.
Design Mindful?
At least in the US, “popular” design is about adding pleasant visual affect to things or concepts already in place. What a thin notion! It is more than the way something looks. With Visual design you will get as many different opinions as there are individuals, but with Functional design you tend to get a clustering of slightly differentiated thoughts. When the Function drives the design, opinion is removed. It either solves the problem or it doesn’t.
Maybe the reason so many people are afraid of design, or indifferent, is because it takes time. They’ve tried to design something, and it didn’t come easy, so they gave up. Design takes effort. It takes rigor. If you’re not a designer, you may think ideas ooze from a designer’s pores like sweat and drop on the page in nice neat text and sketches. Not so. Design takes persistence. My business partner always says design is like archeology. When you start out, you don’t know what the end result will be, but you start digging anyway. You may find a little something worth pursuing, so you dig in various directions to uncover it. You start in one direction, but may find nothing. So you dig in another direction. Eventually you uncover the first piece, but you have several pieces left to find, then uncover. It’s a process. But when you’re done, you may have a profound discovery.
If you find yourself working on a creative endeavor and after long hours of effort you tell yourself, “this is good enough,” then it’s probably not good enough. Take a break and come back later. Take a walk. Take a drive. Do something, but don’t give up. Care more. Some people are more “tolerant” of bad design than others. The ones less tolerant are usually motivated to find an alternative.
Steve Jobs says, “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.” Therefore, good design involves finding the essence, the meaning, the soul, of something and expressing it. It’s not easy, but it is rewarding. And it makes a difference. Design matters, and good design matters more.
