Activity First, it’s a two parter where we ask what you associate design before reading or listening to all this and then again afterwards.
Design, what is it?
“Design is when designers design a design to produce a design.”
— John Heskett
Design, noun; a field of occupation and study.
design, verb; to design.
design, noun; a plan to create.
design, noun; a product, process or a system.
Design is both an academic pursuit and a practice that anyone can do and build their skills doing overtime.
There are broadly three main domains in academia:
Natural Sciences: Disciplines include mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, astronomy, environmental science, and more.
Social Sciences: Disciplines include sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, economics, geography, communication studies, and others.
Humanities: Disciplines include history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, cultural studies, fine arts, music, and more.
Which do you think Design falls under?
If you guessed all of them, you’re right!
Some like to call design a ‘meta-discipline’ and designers as natural interdisciplinary facilitators because of this, others like to call us dirty little thieves who don’t know their place.
If you’re thinking this has not explained Design at all and I’m more confused than before, you’re right! Academically, the definition of Design is still discussed. Obviously not happy with his first definition, John Heskett had this, which I feel, more accurately portrays the meaning of design.
“Design: The deliberate and reasoned shaping and making of our environment in ways that satisfy our needs and give meaning to our lives” – John Heskett
So how do you know when you are are designing?
This is more straight forward luckily
The Design Council’s ‘Double Diamond’ is the most common process that designers go through when they are designing something. The process involves expanding insights and ideas and then converging on a solution going forwards.
The Double Diamond by the Design Council 2023
Discover: Understand the issue rather than merely assuming it. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.
Define: The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help to define the challenge in a different way.
Develop: Give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.
Deliver: Involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will.
Behind the double diamond is the driving thought of design, specifically Human-Centred Design, “What do people want? What do people need, require, and desire?”
This almost always needs the input of the people we are trying to design for. There are many ways designers do this including but not limited to; co-design, interviews, cultural probes and more.
These approaches and methods can be applied to what Buchanan refers to as the 4 Orders of Design. The higher you go in the order the more complex it gets.
All the orders of design sit within one another with 1st order being the smallest and least complex and 4th order being the biggest and most complex.
Let’s think of a cup of take-away coffee. It has graphics on the cup, the cup is an object holding your coffee, you got that coffee through a service, and it all exists within the system of that company.
Here are some examples to help you image what the orders look like.
1st Order – Communication
2nd Order – Objects + Artefacts
3rd Order – Interactions
4th Order – Systems + Environments
The impact of design on our world is immeasurable, and not all of it has been good.
The Good
They say that good design is invisible but bad design you find everywhere. This usually refers to when things work well, you won’t notice it because it is doing what you think it should be doing, but when it doesn’t it can be very frustrating. When I talk about design being good here, I mean it as both working an unnoticed but also ethical. As with anything ethical, this comes with a bit of bias on my behalf.
As an example design has been used to challenge a law backed by agrochemical interests, where 97% of fruits and vegetables were banned from being grown. France’s Supermarket Carrefour designed ‘The Black Supermarket’, selling prohibited produce to champion biodiversity and support local farmers. This initiative influenced a new EU law that allows for these fruits and vegetables to be grown again.
You can find more of the good design can and has done through the Design Councils’ Design Value Framework here
The Bad
However… there are many examples of bad design.
These examples are much easier to recognise because many of them are big news stories. Single-use plastics, Planned Obsolescence (this is where something is only designed to last so long so you’ll have to buy more of them, lightbulbs are an example of that), Greenwashing (when companies advertise they are environmentally friendly but are not). A particularly devious piece of design is the ‘Carbon Footprint’, designed by British Petroleum. This attempted to shift the responsibility of environmental pollution and its global consequences from fossil fuel companies to you and me.
Design is changing
New fields of design are emerging to tackle large complex situations, sometimes called ‘Wicked Problems’ because there are no right or wrong answers. These fields are using system approaches and methods such as Causal Loop Diagramming to try and better discover, define, develop and deliver at the 4th order level of design.
Tackling larger problems requires multiple disciplines, experts and stakeholders. Designers are not, and do not claim to be, experts in everything, but we are good at creating methods to bring everyone together and help understand each other (also we’re okay at pub quizzes).
Want to know more? You can speak to Andrew (designer) in the Research Hub or drop him an email at a.tibbles@liverpool.ac.uk, He (I) is friendly, promise.
Activities
We’d like you to hear your preconceptions of what you thought design is, what design does and how and then after either reading or watching the video, has your opinion about design changed at all
However, we have to be official with this so if you haven’t filled out a participant consent form for our online workshops yet please do so now and email it to me at a.tibbles@liverpool.ac.uk before continuing. If you’ve done it already, carry on!
Once that is done you can fill out the forms below to your heart’s content as many times as you like.
The Inclusionaries Lab 