Arguments in favor of a deeper understanding of the role of design and its importance in human affairs. Starts simple, gets real deep real fast.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Imagine trying to apply that understanding to route planning. To literally travel a straight line between two points in space you would have to forego concern for buildings, trees, and other obstructions. You would have to violate the conventional uses and structural integrity of properties or habitats — and quite violently. And, if the points you were traveling between were far enough apart you’d even have to cut a trench or bore a tunnel through the earth. You would have to not only carry with you the equipment and power sources to make all of this destruction possible, but you would have to contend with others defending their vested interests and with ongoing retaliation from virtually everyone whose life you would necessarily disrupt.
The motivation to design comes from the realization that the shortest distance between two points is almost never a good idea.
Seeing that straight lines are generally out of the question, route planning starts to increase in complexity. Start walking, come to a barrier or a property line, do you go left or right? Do you go back and get your bike? Do you drive, call a car service? Does your present context merit some brisk running and the hopping of fences? Maybe going a little out of your way to enjoy a quiet parkway will be worthwhile. Ooo, and it’s sunny, so you should wear that one hat.
If every specific question and possibility that could be posed about your journey were considered it would take days just to think through the necessary pathfinding and provisions to get to the post office and back.
There are thousands, possibly millions, of variables informing the chosen path. They fall into a few general buckets. What is your goal in taking this journey? What is the scale of the distance? What is the necessary timing? Does it matter what the experience of the journey is like? Are you more concerned with getting to your destination or with leaving your present location? What provisions are necessary and available for the trip? Each of these questions is a container for many little possibilities. But we don’t always ask even these large questions before we leave the house. How do we ever get anywhere?
Good design is possible because of constraints.
A line of thinking which contributes to good design is a line of thinking which introduces a constraint. If a line of thinking doesn’t introduce a constraint, it doesn’t improve the design. Learn to view “constraint” as the most delightful word in the English language and you are halfway to being a great designer.
The initial problem that any design sets out to solve is itself a constraint. Really, it’s a set of constraints. And, a good designer starts with that set and then seeks out others or applies the relevant constraints from a known design framework.
Consider the task of designing a business card. At the rookie level, you think that your job is to get the information from the client and decorate it onto the business card. Design is not decoration. I remember spending hours reviewing design books, looking at type decisions, paper choice, margins, uses of shape and graphical elements. It’s all fun stuff, and can make a piece of paper pretty. Eventually you learn that the design process has to move up to the choice of content itself. Most professionals shouldn’t have social media handles on the their business cards. A few people really should. Almost no one who has “CEO” on their business card ought to. “Chief” implies that there is more than one tier of command, and the EO implies that there are other chiefs. What these elements imply and the possibilities for mitigating or enhancing those implications starts to take precedence as the designer gains clarity on what problem they’re actually responsible for solving.
Eventually, the question of whether of not a business card is a good inclusion in the overall set of business collateral for a firm becomes the first design decision regarding business cards. That’s a design decision. Is this thing necessary at all? Does it create advantage? Half way through the first meeting, I’ve told about half a dozen people who have come to me for logo design that there was no reason they needed a new logo, or sometimes a logo at all.
The better you get at designing, the more you have to zoom out. Because design is problem solving in advance, and seemingly small problems have this tricky habit of being symptoms of bigger problems.
But, let’s zoom back down to the humble business card for a moment. The constraints involved in the creation of a business card for a client may be stated as follows:
All but one line begins with “must” because if the artifact produced does not tick these boxes then the design has failed. I emphasize ‘failed’ because this is not a list of arbitrary, redundant, or optional characteristics — except that last line. That’s optional. As we can infer from the word ‘may’, the search for constraints sometimes reveals targets-of-opportunity.
I could write a whole chapter about this set of constraints alone, but it wouldn’t belong in this book. Why? Because of the constraints implied by the thesis of this book. This book is not a treatise on graphic design but of social design. Graphic design is only relevant in so much as it provides one suitable frame of reference for the design process. Other design fields, such as architecture, engineering, or even monetary policy design could also serve this purpose. But, in this text, they are the metaphor not the subject. That’s a constraint.
Consider the task of designing a currency.
The constraints involved in the creation of a currency would stipulate that it:
And, yeah, that just about covers it. From there it’s just marketing. Fewer constraints than well produced business cards, but man are those first two tough to get right. The big new kid on the block, Bitcoin, royally shat the bed on point one, and will almost certainly never be a contender for a general use currency because of it. It’s simply a vehicle for speculation and all of the parasitic nonsense that comes with it. #sorrynotsorry.
What is difficult is to know what the appropriate constraints are for each design problem.
If we consider our initial concern, the path between two points, the number of questions that we could ask in order to understand just the plausible paths — let alone the optimal path — is many, many questions. So, how does anyone get anywhere? Well, it’s rather useful to recall that at first none of us did.
Do you remember being a young child and getting lost? This might be another gen X thing, latch key life and all. If your childhood was anything like mine, at some point you were probably lost in your own neighborhood — or one not far away, lost in the woods, lost in a labyrinthine church basement, lost in a museum, and those are just some of the literal places I’ve been lost. Let’s not even get started on the figurative places I’ve been lost. Honestly, I’ve gotten lost to the point of actual dizziness just staring at a go board. Pathfinding is hard. It’s hard in the default world. It’s even hard in simplified virtual environments. For any of you that have spent a little time playing video games, surely you’ve seen some sprite “walking” steadily into a wall. Even in simplified models of life, where some of the best programers in the world have manufactured not only the terrain but the physics, it is still difficult to provide the programs that live in that environment with instructions for navigating about. More pointedly, it’s difficult to account for all of the edge cases. It’s those edge cases that sneak up on you.
So, if you generally find that you succeed at getting where you mean to go, then guess what? You are qualified to be a designer. Or, you will be as soon as you can get clear on how you make it happen.
Design processes are established methodologies for solving problems without asking every possible question.
In order to get from point A to point B you necessarily learned something like a design process.
You are a designer of journeys.
Without going into all of the components of that design process, we can see much of how design works just by looking at two aspects of journey design, transport and path. Decisions have to be made about both, and they are somewhat interrelated. But, at some point you learned that — even if you start by doing some thinking about both — there needs to be a final decision about the means of transport before there can be a final decision about the course of the path. Anyone who designs journeys, which probably includes you, knows this. It doesn’t work well to decide your exact route without knowing your method of transportation. And, there are similar heuristics for every other aspect of getting from one place to another.
You know it so well that you probably don’t even think about it. You just apply the process, whatever your specific version of the flowchart of decision-making is, you have it down. You know how to apply the method.
That’s what it’s like to have a design process.
Once you have osmosed your process, like finding your way around town, iron-chef-ing a meal together, or politely rejecting a guy so that he walks away feeling like he won something, once you own that process, you never think about all of the little variables that get analyzed and synthesized seamlessly through the process.
This chapter is still in refinement. The remaining sections of this chapter include arguments that we have come to abuse arithmetical thinking, that we have failed to apprehend the nature of problems, expressions, and other elements of deliberative cognition, and that while I am currently proposing that we replace extant political processes with design processes that no assertion is being made here that we can transcend the political. Design has always been political. It is not the political nature of social existence that this book makes arguments against, it is the juvenile nature of currently accepted political processes.
Magic is RealEmergence & DesignSubjectivity & the Myth of ParadoxIdeology is the Opposite of DesignEssentialismCorrect AnswersJumping to SolutionLitigiousnessRigidity & the Myth of BeliefIntroduction to Designing SocietyPatterns, Values & Meaning