Design used to be a collection of disciplines that were tightly connected to specific media and crafts: graphic design, product design, fashion, architecture, interactive media. Designers could be skilled masters of form or materials, or conceptual thinkers who added multiple layers of meaning to their concrete interventions, or anything in between, but the underlying craft (the ultimate ‘how’) was the essence of their professional identity. This is changing rapidly, however.
First of all, we are seeing cross-disciplinary collaborations: different kinds of designers in teams, designers and artists, designers and software engineers, designers and professionals from other disciplines, from other sectors in society, like care or security. Much of this may seem not-so-new, since design has a long history of working with engineers and other professionals, but there’s more to it. In the past, technological developments would basically spawn new disciplines. Architecture came from construction, product design came from the industrial production of goods, interaction from the IT revolution, service design from the way IT enabled the coupling of different interfaces to services and infrastructures. New technologies, new design disciplines, with a clear adjective preceding the word ‘design’: ‘graphic design’, ‘industrial design’, ‘interaction design’, and, quite recent ‘user experience design’ and ‘social design’.This was part of a designer’s professional identity, and it was part of design education. You would study graphic design in order to become a graphic designer and you would end up doing graphic design. Straightforward. But as more design disciplines were being created, there was a growing awareness of what connects all these disciplines together: not materials, forms, or media, but more a kind of a mentality that is focused on creativity and originality, on beauty and human meaning, on subjective interpretations (from the designer’s point of view) of problems, challenges or issues. As design moves away from the senses and from tangible products, into domains like ‘experiences’, or ‘social relationships’, notions like ‘quality’ or even ‘beauty’ become conceptual and, more than ever before, even existing design disciplines start valuing conceptual over sensorial. It’s more important for even an industrial product to ‘do the right thing’ than it is to ‘look good’.
When Rob Schröder, a well known graphic designer in The Netherlands, asked me to run the post-graduate degree in ‘graphic design’ with him at the Sandberg Institute in the mid-nineties, we decided to scrap the word ‘graphic’, and just call it ‘design’. Although we would mainly get students with a graphic design background, they were free to work in any medium. This resulted in student projects that featured many different media: not just books and posters, but also interactive software, documentaries, rituals, installations, environments, etc. We would stimulate them to collaborate with people from different fields in order to ‘get it right’ with respect to technological and organisational aspects of their work. We also noticed that the students never thought twice about engaging with different crafts and form languages. We would judge students on their ability to translate original ideas into concrete interventions; visual appearance was considered less relevant.
In the late nineties, the Design Academy Eindhoven also made an interesting choice in the way it structured its design education. Departments were created along the lines of human activity, rather than based on specific design fields or form languages: ‘man and identity’ or ‘man and leisure’, rather than ‘graphic design’ or ‘product design’. Nowadays, the departments have different names (no more ‘man and’ names for obvious reasons), but the focus remains on different realms of human life rather than on skillsets or media. The academy even struggles with the legacy of its own history in product design because it wants to move away from the design of things and objects, and into teaching design as a strategic discipline for creative and meaningful innovation in many contexts and domains.
Design has thus evolved itself as a discipline and has engaged itself stronger and stronger with problems, challenges and issues, rather than with forms and media.
This brings us to our second point: design thinking. Many other professionals and practitioners from different disicplines have become enamored with what is sometimes called ‘design thinking’, an ill-defined, but increasingly popular current trend that ranges from the use of empathic research and experimenting with prototypes to more thorough approaches to understanding and working with human meaning, such as Kees Dorst’s Frame Creation model, that Kees and I both work with and teach. The essence of ‘design thinking’ is that elements of design practice are seen as useful by professionals in other fields. This can range from simple visualisation techniques to imagine new futures to methods and techniques to more elusive phenomena like ‘an artistic mentality’. Non-designers are learning from design and adopting and adapting some of its practices. They are designing things, systems, infrastructures and government policies. Does that make them designers? Does it matter what they are called?
When we focus on the mentality aspect of design, how does that then translate into criteria for judging or evaluating actual designs or interventions? What is ‘good’ design thinking? Is there still a role for aesthetics? There is a long history of valuing design based on form quality—visual appearance has been very dominant for a long time. This even found its way into consumer culture, where a ‘design chair’ differs from a ‘chair’ because of its looks, while you can probably sit fine on either. As we start designing social processes, complex systems and infrastructures, it is clear that we’ve left the world of appearance behind. The question then becomes: can systemic interventions still be judged aesthetically? Is there such a thing as ‘systemic beauty’? My answer to that question is ‘yes, there is’. There is beauty everywhere, in every discipline, in every sector of society. It is not always (read: rarely) considered relevant or worthy of pursuit, but it does exist. Mathematicians can marvel at elegant proofs that are simple and at the same time powerful. I’ve had discussions with school teachers about the beauty of education, where they told me that when they witness a child ‘getting it’ after they have just explained something, they can feel elated, as if time and space disappear for an instant. If that is not an aesthetic experience, I don’t know what is. Civil servants may talk about government policies in terms of ‘ugly’ or ‘beautiful’. Care workers very often talk about their work in similar terms—that it is beautiful to help people. Not just humane, or effective, but ‘beautiful’.
These two developments force us to rethink what design is. The field itself has moved from media to meaning as it started to focus on challenges and issues (inside-out), and other professional domain are actively seeking new ways of dealing with complex problems and issues (outside-in) and are turning their attention to design as well. This is what happens when design moves away from form and defines itself by the mentality with which it approaches problems and challenges. Forget about ‘design’ ‘looking beautiful’, look for more conceptual kinds of beauty when it comes to designing systems, organisations or infrastructures. When is a systemic intervention beautiful? As with visual appearance and more traditional approaches to aesthetics, ‘beauty’ is impossible to define. It is, however, easily recognizable when it manifests, however intangible it may be. I believe that the main challenge for design education is the nurturing of this aesthetic sensibility and the ability to translate it into the design of… well… anything, really. It is not a body of knowledge, or a set of skills, it is a mentality with ‘beauty’ as a core value to fight for.