Design Without Designers

This debate has been going on for years in advertising. There is a cultural gulf between direct response advertising people and general advertising people. Direct response people know to the penny how well different adverts work because it is intrinsic to their medium. As a result, there exists a set of near-inviolable laws on how to run a direct response campaign that works. Long TV slots always work better than short ones, long copy in print works better than short copy, simple illustrations work better than clever art and so on. These rules almost directly contradict what is considered good by general advertising people, who rarely ever try to measure the effect of their advertising on the bottom line.

As business people, we have two choices. We can trust the taste and intuition of designers and hope that their vision is what the market demands. Or, we can test and measure relentlessly, seeking always to measure what matters - whether a decision will be profitable or not. It is entirely plausible that a test-driven environment may miss out on sparks of creative genius that happen to be utterly untestable. It is also possible that there is an invisible teapot orbiting the sun. I factor neither possibility into my decisions because I cannot possibly make rational decisions on that basis.

It has never been cheaper or easier to test. Rapid prototyping means that even complex hardware can be produced for testing at a cost which pales in comparison to the tooling for a mass-production run. Just In Time techniques and electronic point of sale systems allow brick-and-mortar retailers to test endless permutations of merchandising. A business without systematic testing is a ship with no compass. Gut instinct is valuable and laudable, but to fail to confirm it empirically is utterly foolish when the costs of testing are so small relative to the costs of even the most minor failure.

While what Google is doing with their data-driven design decisions is fascinating, remember that you cannot do this for all industries. You can't give people cars in different shapes and colors and see what happens. You can't design 20 iPhone models, make 100,000 of each design and try to sell them to see which one to carry on. A good designer's intuition will tell you which 19 to nix before they hit production. And if not 19, then at least 17. My point is that Google and Amazon (and other web-based retailers/content providers) are somewhat unique in this respect.

I think we designers are getting what we deserve based on our stupid pseudo-intellectual behavior of the last years.

Starting with the Bauhaus, designers around the world started to claim that design has nothing to do with art, self-expression and beauty for the sake of beauty (or _decoration_, which they call it). We tried to convince the world that design is a pseudo-scientific discipline which tries to solve communication problems in effective ways, which can only happen by the means of methodic procedures overlooked by experienced designers.

Bullshit. We got very good at bullshit. The biggest design shops in the world charge millions for design manuals full of bullshit that tries to justify ugly designs. Just look at the GAP redesign.

We got what we deserved because guess what: machines, data-driven procedures and crowdsourcing communities are better at the whole communication problems in effective ways thing, minus the bullshit.

What we need to do is return to make things beautiful. Beauty is still important for the world. Data-driven design can only to produce things that are good-enough/above-the-average. Like the auto-generated songs and novels of 1984, they can create blandness or even pop, but not beautiful subversive punk.

And let the bullshit design justifiers die a slow painful death.

Data-driven design rarely inspires culture and emotional identity. For that you need to start with a vision.

The resistance of bad designers against codification of design is astonishing. Good designers recognize that there is a language to design, based in culture. Good design doesn't just happen in a vacuum, radiating fully-formed from betwixt the ears of the design-genius. It has to communicate with the consumer, and that communication has to be effective. It's a similar sort of attitude that we see amongst bad programmers, insisting that day-to-day programming has nothing to do with mathematics.

Example: a bad designer would say that abstract paintings can mean anything. A painting of overlapping dark blue orbs could represent anger, or frustration, or happiness. Such a statement would be not only be completely wrong, but downright troubling as to the artists' culturally insensitivity. In Occidental culture, we often use bright reds to represent anger and frustration, and light blues and pinks make happy feelings.

Another example: in Japanese culture, white is often symbolic of death. If you're designing a hero character, you will either refrain from dressing the character in white, or you will intentionally dress the character in white, knowing that you seek to make the character an anti-hero. But you cannot effectively make that decision unless you understand the visual language of that culture.

The extent to which design cannot be codified by a designer is the extent to which that designer does not understand the culture for which she or he is designing. Every element of design is communicating a piece of information. Every element. That the designer does not understand what a particular element is communicating -- either at all or only on a subconscious level -- does not change the fact that it is there.

Art and science are not mutually exclusive pursuits, they are fundamentally intertwined parts of the creation and understanding process. Even advanced quantum and particle physics requires some level of art in designing experiments. Or did you think that those folk at CERN know exactly how to prove and disprove every hypothesis they come up with?

Even Einstein knew a thing or two about design: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.", which we often summarize by saying, "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Good taste, iteration, and eating your own dogfood goes a long way.

Design isn't some unattainable skill, and people new to it can still do a good job designing stuff. It's more like an opinion, sure, some people have such a correct track record with their opinions that they can make a good career out of it.

Taking a cognizant viewpoint and crystallizing it though iteration is do-able. Just make sure you've got good taste.

I would imagine automated design tools will work about as good as CASE (Computer-aided software engineering) tools. Ok for a limited set of areas, but nothing really inspiring.