The cast
I always have been a visual (people now call it frontend) developer for the first time I worked. I came out from an art school and started as a Flash developer straight away ; then switched to Javascript as the revolution was rising. For some reasons, engineers and backend-developers would always summarize my kind as "he-plays-with-colors-and-transitions", and graphic designers would put me into the "cli-and-black-screen-ide-kind-of-guy" category.
Ten years of experience brought me into weird places that I didn't even think of. I now kinda understand Linux kernel, hardware design and still (try to) keep on the latest roll-over trends. It gives me good knowledge of the whole chain of design and production, and for such I have been hired as the only creative developer / technical advisor of a design team which produces objects for the internet of things.
The pitch
As we were urged to join a meeting lately, I was feeling nervous : the entire design team was about to be pitched about a new object to create, which would interact with a technological asset of a partner of ours (I can't say much more). I was thrilled. I studied the asset carefully, got my hands on it, played with it for a while. I knew its constraints, capabilities. However, we focused on how the object would be, and what would be the interactions. The entire meeting were about use-cases and object shapes. While I was completing use-cases with my recently acquired knowledge, someone reminded me that :
"These things are part of the production process and should not be considered in the design phase".
Technological constraints of the asset were relayed to "production matter" and were not "a thing to consider for a design team". I argued for a while, and this one finished me down:
As designers, we define the "what", not the "how". Production will take care of the "how".
As much as I felt part of a design team, I was down : tech is no design.
The plot
Part one: the what and their how.
So, the what is a job for designers and the how is a job for production. At first it looked right in a very macro scope of a project, but was this division really necessary, or even relevant?
If you need to answer a problem, the question you may ask first is : "What do you want to achieve ?" ; then only you will try to find how to full-fill that need.
Johan Redström, a professor of Design who teaches at the very great Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden, wrote in 2005 a paper called "On technology as material in design".
As obvious at it sounds, his writing would first describe how important it is for a designer to consider user rejection and user frustration ; how important it is to let a user have a part of liberty in the use of an object to convert frustration into creativity ; how to play with that to make a better solution.
The use proposed by a design need, however, not be accepted at all. […] Use can be a creative practice where people find their own interpretations of objects and what it means to use them. Whether we come to the conclusion that the models of use that the object embodies provoke creative re-interpretation and re-appropriation, or whether the optimisation of functions creates frustrating constraints, it is clear there is much to the use of technical objects that is not captured by a reference to its practical functionality. […] these expanding views on what using technical objects is like, have some implications for how we think about designing them. Clearly, if we think that the design of such things is primarily about implementing practical functions, our focus being on how to properly specify and evaluate those functions, these perspectives seem to urge us to reconsider the importance not only of 'what' a thing does, but also 'how'.
We could summarise that into : designers produce use-cases as a how to solve a what in a form of real-life scenario with a set of constraints which defines the final solution.
– What do you want to achieve ? – I'd like to be able to sleep during day. How can i do that ?
- We can invent curtains. It will be put over your window and act as a barrier between the light and you.
- We can invent sleeping mask. You need to wear it over your head, onto your eyes.
- …
In a micro-scoped sight, it appears that designers indeed deal with both what and how. So why is that the contraints I was bringing into the use-cases were not receivable as a part of the their how?
Part two: their how and my how.
I took a long time to think about it : how nowadays, technology is different than "design" ; where is the frontier, and on which side of the line you stand depending on your job.
I recently attended a conference held by Adobe, where Jean Louis Fréchin talked for an hour about his experience as an industrial designer who started to consider technology as one of the asset of design a long time ago. In that speech (around 8:50) sits a fascinating statement:
"Design" comes from Italian "disegno" which means "The incandescence of an [art] masterpiece and the way it has been executed."
Jean-Louis would tell the story about french kings, in our not-so-distant past, who said that their language was so rich and various that it felt wrong to express two things with one single word. He describes how they separated "disegno", which expressed the "soul and the body" (as in "the incandescence and its execution") into french "dessein" for the first part, and "dessin" for the other. Since then a frontier between design and technical was drawn.
Johan Redström, in his own way, would also describe such a frontier in describing the perception we have of materials and their properties.
[…] the materiality of technologies differs from that of traditional design materials. Perhaps we cannot physically shape computational things with our hands the way we shape wood, glass or concrete. But, as discussed above, this is not only a question of the properties of matter, perceivable or not, but of what frame of reference we use, and what questions we ask as we engage in design.
The reveal
I realised that the feeling I had while I was playing with the technological piece of art of our partner, was just the same as a painter who knew his paint, his canvas : there was no frontier, and there have never been any ; only "a frame of reference we use, and questions we ask as we engage in design" ; as Disegno would originally mean.
What is out here standing in my way, is a legacy, an old perception that technology cannot use the same terminology or processes, and this only because of its immaterial nature.
The comeback
Since this reflexion, I started to think of a way to make my designers realise this on their own. Creative engineers such as Gustave Effeil tried to reconcile both by achieving masterpieces but in the collective psyche, design and technology are still torn apart. How could I achieve that on my own? I started to think about a way to dodge the problem instead of solving it.
If we can't change people's mind and reunite disegno, why not try to make people consider technology as one of the many tools of design?
Yes, it sounds foolish.
The end will exactly be the same. The difference will be in the perception of the resolution : design and technology won't date and make babies together. design will absorb and use it for its own good.
The fighting plan is split in two main parts :
- Show examples of classic design material forms of expression
- Show examples of technology's forms of expression
The resolution will be about pointing out similarities on both mechanisms and convince the crowd that in the end, those similarities make the two families a big, united one.
The happy ending
Here's the presentation I've been making since about the subject. I hope you'll find it useful, and that you'll use it to open the wild world of technologies to your designers' toolset.