Design principles in the midst of chaos
Awhile ago, I went to a screening of Gary Hustwit’s film about the designer Dieter Rams. In it, Rams lived in a neighbourhood of his own design, surrounded by products he designed. It was a nice neighbourhood, where everything still worked and was, in its way, beautiful. But it was also a museum.
Rams’s products —particularly his furniture designs for Vitsœ, with whom I worked as a consultant a few years ago — haven’t changed since the 1960s. That’s not a criticism: that’s their beauty. They’re a system of parts, with a modularity that opens the door to configuration, but not to change itself. By remaining the same, they can be adapted. Changing systems are less adaptable, as anyone who has had to buy 7 different adaptors for a new Mac can tell you, Apple’s professed love of Rams’s design principles notwithstanding.
“Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance.”— Dieter Rams
I used to believe that system design for products required working like Rams did: knowing all the piecemeal pieces, describing how it all works, then putting together beautiful diagrams and labels, universal and absolute. I don’t know if this was a symptom of too much time spent as a consultant, or an offshoot of being a writer and wanting to control everything. Probably both.
But the work I’ve done in content design for products has required exactly the reverse of that. It’s required me to describe systems not for forever, but enough to be usable; to define only small parts of systems that are not well-structured, nor easily fixed. It’s meant stretching toward clarity amid mess and instability.
Maybe that means I haven’t been designing systems at all. Or maybe I‘ve been designing within them as best I could — and maybe we all are.
We like to believe everything we make is new. But even new products live in and connect to a larger set of systems that builds them, hosts them, sells them.
At worst, digital systems are hacked together with wire and string; at best, they’re elegantly fluid but mutable (but the elegance doesn’t last long). And none of them do well at engaging with the social systems they’re part of, user-centred design or not. At best, they have benign but still unexpected effects on the social fabric around them. At worst, those unexpected effects are the result of careless, even wilful denial.
“Good design is honest… It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.” — Dieter Rams
So I’ve had to look for stability in the mess, and for small gains. I’ve learned it’s my job as a system designer to learn; to develop an empathy that helps me anticipate the things that can affect a system before they arrive; to look for new stresses, changing actors, local solutions. It’s not my job to arrive at a frozen kit of parts — much as my brain wants that clarity.
I’ve had to become comfortable with chaos, without giving in to it, in order to keep moving forward. These are the traits I think have helped me do that— my own principles of good design. It’s fitting that there are an awkward 7 of them.
- Have a shareable method of understanding — a way in that helps others see
- Make sure the only assumptions I make are about how much I don’t know
- Learn to grasp new system implications more swiftly
- Connect new knowledge to as many system parts as possible
- Share knowledge whenever I find it
- Be able to move forward without knowing everything
- Become more resilient every day
