Jan
18
I’ve been thinking a lot on Design lately; specifically what it means to me, what it means to my clients and what other colleagues think about it.
It all started last week after my brother shared this quote with me:
Web Development can be really frustrating because customer expectations are hard to define due to the subjective nature of Art
After 11 years of working on this field I couldn’t agree more, yet everyday I convince myself that it can’t be like this forever, that at one point people will understand that like all forms of design, visual design is about problem solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion. As developers we are both part of the problem and part of the solution, the sooner we understand that, the sooner we’ll be able to asume our responsibility of educating clients and users.
In late 18th Century people were amazed by this new invention called the telephone. It totally changed the perception they had on space and time at that point. Just being able to communicate with someone who was not physically in the same room, blew their minds.
But they communicated with other people, they didn’t talk to each other.
Why? Well, before there were telephones, the most similar approach of communication at that time was the was the telegraph, so everything users knew about communications when the telephone came in, was inherited from the telegraph.
Instead of talking to each other, they communicated as if they were redacting a telegraph:
Urgent stop. Need Groceries stop. Your parents dropped by stop.
Hello this is the bill collector, is your mommy home?. “No”. And your daddy?. “He’s also hiding.”
It took time and education from the media itself to make users understand that they weren’t charged by the letter, that they could in fact establish a normal dialogue between the other party just as if they were both in the same room.
Users will learn if care to teach them.
The most important thing I learned in all this years of Web Development is that design is NOT art.
Coming from a Motion Graphics and Editorial background, to me this was a really hard concept to grasp and I promise to write more in depth post about it, but thanks to Google, today I found a much simpler way to explain this through the philosophy of the furniture-making shakers:
Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful
The Shakers, a religious group from the 17th Century (probably more remembered by their design achievements than by their religious beliefs) had a very interesting philosophy: Their main priority was to build something that was necessary and useful (problem solving), and then focused on making it beautiful.
That’s how they invented among other things, the circular saw, the washing machine and the flat broom. Their furniture design and sales techniques in the mid- 19th century left a huge legacy for today’s Scandinavian design. IKEA anyone?
A great example of this design/problem solving philosophy can be found on this US Navy Pilot Training Manual, called Flight Thru Instruments published in 1945 and designed by the Graphic Engineering Staff at General Motors.
The US Navy needed an effective way to teach pilots, aeronautical navigation concepts and techniques, so their approach was to create useful data visualizations (also known as info-graphics) and the results is this 63 Years old beautifully illustrated manual. I know very few books (and even websites) that look half this good nowadays.
Design is not art. Design is about solving problems in a creative way/space.
When people enjoy Art, they look at it and their response is “I like that”. When people enjoy Design, their response is “This works well”, and US Navy manual certainly accomplish that.
If you would like to enjoy other great examples of data visualizations, check out Smashing Magazine’s latest Mondays Inspiration series.
1
Urgent stop. Need Groceries stop. Your parents dropped by stop. the same opinion:-)
