Feature: A Hierarchy of Complexity

This is an extract from Bill Moggridge's new book "DESIGNING INTERACTIONS", published by MIT Press in December 2006, in which he considers the scale of complexity that different types of design involve.


When I graduated from college as an industrial designer in 1965, I expected to spend my life designing mass-produced objects to be manufactured in metals and plastics.Thinking about what people want from an object was a predominant consideration for the design, but there was an assumption that the most complex aspect would be to think about the subjective and qualitative values that would help the designer to create an appropriate aesthetic, so most of the research into what people wanted was aimed at discovering those subtle values that could inform an intuitive design process. The overall complexity came from synthesizing this understanding with all of the functional attributes of the design, such as performance, assembly, manufacturing, price, distribution, marketing and so on. These constraints demanded collaboration between experts in all of the fields that make up a multidisciplinary team, but with the roles clearly understood, individuals could operate successfully in separate disciplines, as long as they were willing to work together, even though failures were often encountered in companies when communications between discipline based departments were not strong enough. Designers were expected to be fluent with anthropometrics, as that was needed for the design of objects.

Anthropometrics—the sizes of people

For the design of physical objects The constraints are complex enough to demand the core skills of design, but the problems are well understood and have been evolving slowly since industrial design emerged as a new discipline in response to the Industrial Revolution. Designers have to understand basic human factors, but it is reasonable to expect that anthropometrics, or the sizes of people, are the most relevant.Thanks to the human factors work at the office of Henry Dreyfuss, anthropometric information for the designer is easy to find, by referring to the book The Measure of Man or the reference cards in Humanscale, which present the salient dimensions of people of different statures, gender, age, and ethnic background.

Physiology—the way the body works

For the design of physical man-machine systems

The next level of complexity comes when you need to consider actions as well as objects. If the design context includes what the person is doing as well as the things that they are using, the constraints need to include the way the human body works, or physiology, as well as the sizes of people.When you are designing a chair for work, you must consider the danger that long periods of sitting may cause back strain, which demands that you understand the structure of the human spine and the muscles that support it; this is not a constraint when you are designing a casual couch or a bar stool.When you are designing a racing bicycle, you need to know about the way the frame can be fitted to the body to yield the maximum power.When you are designing a keyboard for long hours of typing, you need to understand about tactile feedback for the keystrokes, and repetitive stress for the carpal tunnels.

Once we delve into the specifics of an active context like this, the designer may find that the issues are too complicated to understand and act on intuitively; this is when the partnership between designer and a human factors specialist, in these examples a physiologist, becomes essential. The basic complexity of design constraints still demands subconscious synthesis as well as collaboration between everyone in the multidisciplinary team, but a special connection is needed between designer and physiologist, to allow them to be innovative in the human aspect of the solution.

Cognitive psychology—the way the mind works

For the design of human-computer interactions

Enter the chip! Electronics started with computers, gradually invaded everyday things and places, and are now almost everywhere.This is where we pick up on my stories of designing the laptop and the digital watch, as it is more and more difficult for the designer to understand intuitively about people and what they need and want, as the context is no longer just physical and biomechanical.

Forget your ego, and leave your discipline behind. Let’s do this together! When you are concerned about the constraints that will matter to people when you are designing computers and things that are enhanced by electronic behaviors, you need a much more rigorous understanding of the way the mind works. When the design context includes machine intelligence as well as human intelligence, the design team will benefit from the expertise of a cognitive psychologist and will also need designers who are skilled at designing interactions. At this point in the hierarchy, we have arrived at the contents covered in the first five chapters.

Sociology—the way people relate to each other

For the design of connected systems

Connecting everything together caused the next leap in complexity, when the Internet made connectivity a part of many design problems and solutions. Communications technologies like telephones and broadcast media have been with us for long enough to settle down and become familiar, but the sudden explosion of the Internet added the potential of connectivity to objects and services. Sociologists can help members of a design team understand the implications of this and to operate in the more abstract realm of designing services, where you are affected more by relationships among people as well as between users and objects or interfaces. Although services have been around for a long time, the sudden expansion of technology enabled services— and hence service design as a discipline—is still very new.

The addition of the expertise of sociologists to a design team is especially important when the nature of the constraints is systemic.When we are designing connected systems of products, services, and spaces, which are used in real time, the brain of any designer who tries to absorb all of the constraints is likely to explode.We are better equipped to face the complexity as an interdisciplinary team, with a collective consciousness, and the ability to create designs as a group or team rather than as individuals.

Cultural anthropology—the human condition

For global design

Any designer who has developed a product for a global market has had to face the complexities that come from cultural variations. Some people eat with chopsticks and others with cutlery. And colors have strong symbolic meanings that are specific to particular societies. Cultural anthropologists can help people in a development organization understand the nature of cultural differences, which probably will not be intuitively obvious to them without some direct experience of the variations. There are also variations of culture within a single market, as different groups of people have unique anthropological characteristics, based on their occupation, background, or interests.

Ecology—the interdependence of living things

For sustainable design

At the top of the hierarchy is ecology, where designers need to understand the issues that will affect the environmental condition of our planet as well as the interconnected social and economic systems that we need to sustain.At first thought, sustainable design seems to be in direct opposition to the nature of the consumer society that industrial designers and interaction designers strive to enhance, and is thus a challenging subject for designers to come to grips with. Organizations and processes are emerging that allow the design team to understand and analyze the implications of their designs on sustainability, including the use of materials, energy, and the full lifecycle from “cradle to cradle.” This knowledge is still immature, making design for a sustainable planet an intuitive rather than exact science so far. The designer can intuitively synthesize a complex set of requirements, but the right information has to be there to draw on. Sustainability is still at the level of complexity where the science is not yet well established.

Associated Link: DESIGNING INTERACTIONS

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