Month: October 2015

As I am now really teaching people how to (learn how to) design, I thought to go back to a conversation I had with Carlos last year when he shared a link to the The Manifesto Project on my Facebook timeline. What follows, I realize, has held as my own design manifesto of sorts for at least the last 18 months:

I’m finding more often that design is less a matter of visual style and more about paying attention. Most of the time, the more details that show the decision of a designer to focus the user of an object on the purpose(s) of that object, the better the object serves its user, and therefore, the better the design. Therefore, I’ve been less likely to recommend reading the writings of other designers, lest novices confuse that designer’s aesthetics with their processes.

Where I would start, with a literate audience, is poetry. Start with a haiku. This is the smallest possible object to ‘design,’ and everybody has the tools. Then ask: Why this word and not that word? Why this inflection and not that one?

Get a young designer to think this way, then have them use their phone, their car, their shoes. Successfully honing a design sensibility, in my judgment, is getting that person to look at an object and think, Why this material and not that one? Why this color and not that one? Why this position 35 cm away and not that position 40 cm away? And so on, throughout every syllable of their experience.