Feature: Three Reflections on how to Design Well

Kees Dorst gave a fascinating insight into the way that designers should be changing their thinking for the 21st century (see the UN story: HCI 2004 hears the New Rules of Design) at the British HCI Group conference this year. His recent book offers 150 short reflections on the challenges of design. Here he has allowed us to excerpt three of these reflections with direct relevance to user-centred working.

USER PLAN

As a designer you do not just develop a ‘thing’ (building, machine, product, a service...), you also propose a way of using it. This is a vital part of the new design’s context. Logically the ‘way of using’ or ‘user plan’ should actually be developed first, before the design itself. The things we make do their work in close cooperation with their users, and what exactly the design has to do depends on the role we give them in this choreography. In practice, however, there are not many designers who really take user plans that seriously.

Often, designers only make some assumptions about what users do, and leave it at that. These assumptions will generally not be much different from the current usage of conventional designs, and great opportunities for innovation can be squandered in this way.
Sometimes, the development of the user plan is woven into the development of the design (‘scenario building’). But more often, a rudimentary user plan is constructed as an afterthought when the design has been finished. This explains the awful interface design of some products, and the equally awful quality of manuals that come with most products. In design projects, manuals are almost always forgotten - they are typically made when the product is ready to be shipped to the client. Then the least busy (least bright) person of the development team will hastily be called in to make some sketches and texts, with a lawyer providing extra disclaimers, just to be safe. These cryptic texts are then professionally translated into 7 languages by people that do not know the product, and printed without ever being checked.

It is really strange that the design community, usually so professional, has this collective blind spot for the importance of user plans. Maybe designers are just so focussed on making a Nice Thing that they do not have an eye for anything else. Perhaps it is hard for designers to think in procedures. Or it could be that the development of a good user plan is a lot harder than one would think. The specialist field of interaction design has come up to advocate better treatment of the user. In a way, this should not have been necessary.

THE STORY

When you design, you are actually creating two things in parallel: the design itself and the story behind it. This story consists of all the choices you have made during your design project and the arguments that you used in making them. It is the justification of the design, which explains why the design is constructed in just the way it is.

Of course in any design project, all attention tends to focus on putting the design together. But constructing the ‘story’ is a vital and integral part of any design work. It helps you defend the design to others, and – perhaps more importantly – it allows you, as a designer, to keep track of the design’s progression. It often happens that some of your early decisions must be adjusted or revoked in the later stages of a design project, either because they keep generating problems or because they are just unworkable. That is all part of normal design practice: you take a decision based on the knowledge you have at that moment. Later, when you have acquired more knowledge, you might live to regret those choices.

The tricky thing is to return to those early choices and revise them without wrecking the whole design. A design can be seen as a tightly knitted web of decisions which are not independent from one another. Chances are that if you change one thing, you must readjust a lot of others as well. Keeping track of the story (in notes, annotated sketches, etc) can keep you from getting tangled in your own design.

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS AS SIAMESE TWINS

So design problems are not fixed, but underdetermined, which means that there is room for different interpretations of what the design project should be about. This gives the designer a lot of freedom to explore different interpretations of the design problem. However, it is critical that the interpretation of the design problem is relevant to the stakeholders, and that they also agree on the kinds of solutions this particular view of the design problem will lead to. The interpretation of the design problem and the possible solutions it can lead to cannot be separated. They are Siamese twins.

What then, is a ‘good’ design problem? This becomes a difficult issue if it all depends on how the whole problem/solution system suits the relevant people in the outside world.

To ensure a good ‘fit’ with the stakeholders you first need to find out what their fixed demands are. Around that core problem there is a lot of freedom, where you can choose your interpretation as long as you convince the stakeholders that the way you interpret the problem is going to be fruitful and will lead to a good solution. But you can never be quite sure about that. It helps to generate some ideas early on, as an exploration of what possibly lies ahead, but you never really know beforehand if a certain interpretation of the design problem will lead to satisfying solutions. You will only find out during the design project.

If it turns out that your interpretation of the design problem just generates a lot of dead ends, you have to go back and change your view of the problem. In practice, this is often a struggle. The design problem is the starting point of your thinking, and drastically altering your basic decisions and assumptions halfway through a design project is tough.

I once observed a group of designers in which one person was clearly interpreting the design problem quite differently than the others. She saw the project as a redesigning of the current product, the others treated it as a new, conceptual design challenge. They only discovered this discrepancy quite late in the project, when they were discussing their ideas. She was overruled and had to go along in the conceptual thinking mode of the rest of the group. But she couldn’t make the switch, and ended up just supporting the design process of the others without really contributing any ideas herself. She had lost her view of the design problem, the very foundation of her thinking.

Excerpts from "Understanding Design | 150 Reflections on Being a Designer" by Kees Dorst, ISBN: 90-6369-040-1, The Netherlands: BIS Publishers (http://www.bispublishers.nl/bis-e.htm), 32 Euros.

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