Design is what it does and what it does is solve problems.
Words and the way we use them cheapen our understanding of design. We screw it up in both directions; sometimes we add modifiers to break the granite of design down into so many pebbles, while other times it floats away from us after we over-inflate it as Design with a capital D.
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I’m always wildly uncomfortable when people use the term “creatives” to define the professionals who do the kind of work I do. It harkens back to the pre-digital advertising agency world where a copywriter and a graphic artist teamed up and waited for somebody else to tell them the direction the client and the agency had decided to take for a campaign. Armed with instructions from the agency’s account team, the creative team would churn out their copy and graphics. The creatives’ jobs were essential to their agency’s success, but their work was strictly constrained within a specific stage of the project.
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Design should always be a means to an end, with that end being to solve a well-defined problem. If we over-inflate design and allow it to obscure other aspects of a process, we make it harder to address core challenges.
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I’m not one of those designers who stays up nights worrying about how best to define a thing, but I’ve found it useful to figure out what I think design ISN’T.
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As a result of explosive growth in the use of self-describing code and the increasingly sophisticated application of metadata, online content is getting smarter every day. As content gets smarter, controlling that content gets not only more difficult, but also less appropriate.
Last century when I worked in the print newsroom of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, there was an assistant creative director with a narrow mind and a thick New England accent. For the first few weeks I worked with her, she kept talking about “chattah” and I couldn’t figure out what the hell she was talking about. I was designing news pages and she was responsible for informational graphics that always seemed to be waiting for “chattah” before she could release them to me.
To be effective, our designs need to make our content easy to ignore.
As strange as that might sound, if your most important users can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, it means that they have successfully looked past everything else. Some Web sites make this harder to do than others.
So Ryan Singer from 37signals starts his presentation at the Future of Web Design conference in NYC by saying that words like information architect, interaction designer and user experience consultant are all crap and a sure sign that somebody’s trying to bullshit somebody else. It was mildly irritating because I have no tolerance for bullshit and yet I still find value and meaning in each of those terms. But what I think Singer was really trying to do was to demystify Web design and that’s a good thing. He just chose different words to pick on than I would have.
I would have gone after the word “intuitive.”
When I talk about separating The What from The How, I suspect all some people hear is: “Blah blah blah THE WHAT! blah blah THE HOW! blah blah blah THIS WILL TAKE MORE TIME! blah blah blah.”
Babies poop a lot. Everybody makes jokes about that during the pregnancy, but it has to be experienced to appreciate the true scope of it. Because first-time parents are usually so busy freaking out about everything, their baby’s poop ends up being just another item on a long list. The subtleties of infant waste production go unappreciated.
A baby’s first bowel movement tends to be tar-like and black. This can be disturbing for new parents, but they adjust quickly. Productivity increases and so does fluidity, but parents adjust again, even as deliveries start showing up in unnaturally bright shades of yellow.