In my ongoing search for contemporary definitions of what design is, i am currently reading Making Meaning by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea. Making Meaning is about Experience Design – an approach to the conscious creation of meaning in products and services, according to the authors. I bought the book because i have great respect for Nathan Shedroff’s work and got a lot of inspiration from him in the past.

Although i don’t like the book in particular – too much self-praise for their consulting firm – i think it’s worth a read. In chapter 5 the authors share their understanding of design. Quotes:

When we speak of design, we are talking about a mechanism for consciously creating value based on truly understanding customers as people and, ideally, caring about, having empathy for, and being compassionate towards them […]

This broader definition of design should not be confused with invention, which does not require the production of value to customers […] Inventions are often demonstrations of capability […]

(p.58)

This is the interesting thought that design can be distinguished from other creative roles by the goal of understanding the customer. Consequently, design is – amongst others – an internal communication task:

Design [is] the shared language for collaboration

(p.64)

I like this! It’s true, i can tell.

As a passionate reader of Bruce Nussbaum’s writings for Business Week about design, especially this post is worth a bookmark. Nussbaum cites Hewlett Packard’s design chief Sam Lucente – and gives three points how design is used at HP:

• Design to simplify
• Design to differentiate
• Design to innovate

Nice. Although Sam Lucente refers to product design (as you can see by the examples), my feeling is that it fits to other design disciplines – interaction, communication – very well, too. Some thoughts:

Simplify: about creating artifacts that are humane. Ergonomics, usability, typography (my teacher’s words: „Typografie schafft Ordnung” – typography achieves order).

Differentiate: about creating artifacts that are exciting and build identity. Brand, fashion, style, corporate design.

Innovate („the hardest kind of design”, as Nussbaum writes, „Designers synthesize customer desires, business requirements and technological possibilities…” as Lucente says): describes design as a central task in between the disciplines.

First of all, thank you for your great post and the very insightful discussion in the comments. It seems that you are facing a problem that we Germans definitely do not have. We are suffering from the opposite: a lack of skilled „thinking” designers.

I do strongly agree with you saying design is more than thinking. The „making” is the crucial point where thoughts „get real”. Without the visual expression, a thought has no „shape”, or as we say, „Gestalt”. Gestalt encloses explicitly the visual form of a thing (or person). In Germany, designers are also called „Gestalter”.

But where does the work of a designer end and where does the „manufacturing” begin?

I do agree with you that „attention to detail” must be part of design. A detail can be very important to a thing’s Gestalt. Think of the human face. Some tiny details can shape the appearance of the whole person. But not all details are important. For a designer, it is key skill to know where to put emphasis on.

I do not agree when it comes to „craft”. Crafting includes „producing” the object till it’s finished, and that would include e.g. coding HTML when it comes to web interfaces. This kind of crafting is often called „webdesign”. I guess you know what i mean, you are not searching for a webdesigner. That’s why i say crafts are not part of design.

Looking at the discussion thread, i think a lot of the confusion and irritation is caused by the lack of a common sense: what is design? Not only design education, design in general needs this so desperately. I’m so sick of explaining people what i am doing…

PS.

I like the „Design is like California – nobody is born there.”

What are the 3 main topics when talking about a (so-called) web 2.0 service?

I collected some thoughts for a talk at CoreMedia recently. Although some days passed by since then, i don’t want to miss posting them here. It’s not rocket science, just a personal view on what should be considered.

Most important to me is the discussion about the identity. What do you answer when somebody asks you: „i want to build a „community”. What do i have to do?” I would always answer: what’s your (company’s) identity? Is there a clear vision what you do and what makes your company unique? Without this vision, it is impossible to build a community or to do anything else what makes sense.

I saw an impressive presentation of Jyri Engestöm titled „object centered sociality” at the reboot conference last year. His assumption was that any community is built around a „shared object”. This shared object can be a physical object but mustn’t. It also can be something immaterial like an idea. He describes this thought in his brilliant blog post.

From a perspective of a company that wants to build relationships to its customers, this shared object is the identity. It can be the brand itself or it can be a product, but it must be something thats worth to identify with. The more tangible, the better. Do you identify yourself with Daimler Chrysler? Rarely. With the Mercedes Brand? Maybe. With a specific car, let’s say an 1973 W108 S‑Class? Surely, if you like it. That means that a community around W108-type cars is much more likely a success than a Daimler Chrysler community.

In the example of a german newspaper (the Süddeutsche Zeitung) mentioned in my presentation, the shared object is the city of Munich. The identity of the Süddeutsche Zeitung is closely related to the origin where it comes from, and the same can be said the other way round. Munich strongly benefits from the identity of its famous newspaper. This kind of identity is perfectly suitable to build a „web 2.0”- community. At the moment, they are selling books and videos „through” this identity, with huge success. But some day, they surely will come up with something like a bavarian myspace. Let’s see.

Douglas Bowman is joining Google as Visual Design Lead. So what? People seem to be thrilled. Om Malik writes: „a likely end to the mishmash, drab and boring user interfaces from Google. Yeah!” This announcement made me click through Bowman’s company website and i stopped at the philosopy page where he gives a definition of his understanding of design. It is an interesting read. It starts with:

„Design constructs a visual language for the purpose of communication.”

That means, design is about visual subjects and does not affect other, e.g. functional issues. Further:

It organizes and gives form to a message in a way that adds value and meaning.”

In the way it is said here, design is an add-on to a (previous given) message. Added values are accessibility, attention and beauty in Bowman’s words.

I wonder how this philosophy will fit together with the Google style and culture.

For sure, Google’s applications are not very exciting in terms of typography and graphic design. But they get the balance between visual presence and lots of functionality. In other words: they are not too ugly and not too beautiful.

Visual presence of Google? Yes! Google always had a very strong visual brand. I very well remember the Google story in 2000. At this time i used Altavista for searching and my boss gave me the link to Google. I thought the „ooooo„s were funny and dropped Altavista. Then a collegue of mine from London came up with alltheweb.com, a search engine from FAST (Now alltheweb.com is owned by Yahoo).

I compared the search results with Google and i clearly found that the FAST engine was far better than Google. But the interface was grey and boring. Google was funny. All my other collegues used Google because it was funny and good enough. (I also switched to Google when they bought deja.com, that was something FAST did not have). But Google was (and still is) NOT the best search.

The tipping point was the funny logo and i am sure it was not created by a designer.

It will be very interesting to watch how Bowman will influence Googles interfaces. Will they do more visual design? Add value or meaning to Google applications? Or nothing happens? Time to take some screenshots for the archive.

Derek Powazek wrote an article in A List Apart about the role of writing in interface design. It reads: Calling all designers: learn to write! And he found a great example:

Yes, Derek is right. The importance of the written word cannot be underestimated in web interfaces. That will be a part of rethinking designers’ tools.

Just stumbled on a couple of not very fresh posts about the role of anti-marketing design, as Scoble calls it. His conclusion: The „ugliest designs” seem to make the best profit on the net. Or the other way round: some sites are simply too pretty. Of course there are a lot of so called Elite Designers shouting „but i can make both”. Haha.

Most commenters tell the „design is form & function” and „design makes communication better” stuff. If you are designer it seems to be very painful to agree that Scoble is (mostly) right: there are a lot of overdesigned websites.

Whats the nature of the web? A powershift. The web makes easy access to information to everyone. I can look up stock quotes, price tags for consumer goods, crosscheck what my doctor says or my advocate. Things i could not do before. The web shifts a part of the power from companies and institutions to the individual. That’s great and therefore we all love the internet.

Design has its root in the opposite direction. Design is visible authority. Design is expensive, not everyone can afford it. Authorities always used design to make their power visible. Any designer must be reminded that the toolset we are using has its origin in expressing power within a society.

Assuming that you cannot not communicate, a well designed website always communicates that there must be a kind of authority behind the originator of the service. And that’s what annoys people, they do not want to have any authority in the web. Design – as it is mostly practised in website design – seems to contradict the original meaning of the web.

So design does not make sense at all in the web? I don’t think so. Design must simply respect the web’s nature: gathering information, connecting with other people. There are a lot of examples (flickr is the best in the web2.0 context) that show this can be achieved without producing ugliness. Designing web is more about thinking about functions and how to use them best.

Designers must stand back from their vanity and rethink their tools.

UPDATE

I did not to intend to offend anyone, no matter what religion or profession. I deleted the sentence and apologize about the misunderstanding.