

Design Without Designers - swombat
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/design_without_designers_17587.asp

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jdietrich
This debate has been going on for years in advertising. There is a cultural
gulf between direct response advertising people and general advertising
people. Direct response people know to the penny how well different adverts
work because it is intrinsic to their medium. As a result, there exists a set
of near-inviolable laws on how to run a direct response campaign that works.
Long TV slots always work better than short ones, long copy in print works
better than short copy, simple illustrations work better than clever art and
so on. These rules almost directly contradict what is considered good by
general advertising people, who rarely ever try to measure the effect of their
advertising on the bottom line.

As business people, we have two choices. We can trust the taste and intuition
of designers and hope that their vision is what the market demands. Or, we can
test and measure relentlessly, seeking always to measure what matters -
whether a decision will be profitable or not. It is entirely plausible that a
test-driven environment may miss out on sparks of creative genius that happen
to be utterly untestable. It is also possible that there is an invisible
teapot orbiting the sun. I factor neither possibility into my decisions
because I cannot possibly make rational decisions on that basis.

It has never been cheaper or easier to test. Rapid prototyping means that even
complex hardware can be produced for testing at a cost which pales in
comparison to the tooling for a mass-production run. Just In Time techniques
and electronic point of sale systems allow brick-and-mortar retailers to test
endless permutations of merchandising. A business without systematic testing
is a ship with no compass. Gut instinct is valuable and laudable, but to fail
to confirm it empirically is utterly foolish when the costs of testing are so
small relative to the costs of even the most minor failure.

~~~
hartror
I am not disagreeing with you but this seems illogical to me. Surely
businesses measure the response to general advertising?

~~~
joe_the_user
How?

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hartror
Changes in sales? Surveys of brand awareness? I'm not a traditional marketing
guy but I doubt there aren't techniques that can be used to at least gauge the
response to a campaign. They won't be direct necessarily but they must be
there!

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IgorPartola
While what Google is doing with their data-driven design decisions is
fascinating, remember that you cannot do this for all industries. You can't
give people cars in different shapes and colors and see what happens. You
can't design 20 iPhone models, make 100,000 of each design and try to sell
them to see which one to carry on. A good designer's intuition will tell you
which 19 to nix before they hit production. And if not 19, then at least 17.
My point is that Google and Amazon (and other web-based retailers/content
providers) are somewhat unique in this respect.

~~~
Ataraxy
Actually you can, they're called mockups and focus groups, you don't actually
engineer 20 iphone models or 10 different shaped cars.

~~~
IgorPartola
Absolutely, but the cost is too high. You need to _gasp_ gather people in a
room, give them your product and somehow record their reactions. Don't forget
that it takes real work to pick out focus groups since the dozen individuals
you do use are supposed to represent your _entire_ market. On the other hand,
Google is dealing with hundreds of thousands to many millions eyeballs at
once. And they have a definite metric: did the person click on the ad? Yes,
using the wrong color blue is going to cost them a thousand clicks during the
trial, but now they have the perfect color for the next year or two.

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armandososa
I think we designers are getting what we deserve based on our stupid pseudo-
intellectual behavior of the last years.

Starting with the Bauhaus, designers around the world started to claim that
design has nothing to do with art, self-expression and beauty for the sake of
beauty (or _decoration_, which they call it). We tried to convince the world
that design is a pseudo-scientific discipline which tries to solve
communication problems in effective ways, which can only happen by the means
of methodic procedures overlooked by experienced designers.

Bullshit. We got very good at bullshit. The biggest design shops in the world
charge millions for design manuals full of bullshit that tries to justify ugly
designs. Just look at the GAP redesign.

We got what we deserved because guess what: machines, data-driven procedures
and crowdsourcing communities are better at the whole _communication problems
in effective ways_ thing, minus the bullshit.

What we need to do is return to make things beautiful. Beauty is still
important for the world. Data-driven design can only to produce things that
are good-enough/above-the-average. Like the auto-generated songs and novels of
1984, they can create blandness or even pop, but not beautiful subversive
punk.

And let the bullshit design justifiers die a slow painful death.

~~~
moron4hire
What we understand as "beautiful" is based in cultural traditions. In America,
women want to appear tanned, and will use any variety of chemicals to achieve
a darker complexion. In the Philippines, they want to appear pale, and will
use any manner of chemicals to achieve a lighter complexion. It's not enough
to say, "make it beautiful", you have to understand on a fundamental level
(and you don't understand something on a fundamental level if you can't
articulate it) what that beauty means for your consumers.

~~~
guelo
Some things, such as shiny white boxes from Apple, seem to have universal
appeal.

~~~
etherael
Except that they don't, I can't think of a single thing that has truly
universal appeal, consider apple's market share when you're making the claim
that they do. I even use a fair few of their products and don't find them
"beautiful" by any stretch of the imagination, merely kinda sort functional.

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novon
Data-driven design rarely inspires culture and emotional identity. For that
you need to start with a vision.

~~~
aik
And successfully turn that into a shared vision. In one of my startups a
personal vision unfortunately never translated across and so didn't affect
much in terms of culture, emotion, or dedication.

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moron4hire
The resistance of bad designers against codification of design is astonishing.
Good designers recognize that there is a language to design, based in culture.
Good design doesn't just happen in a vacuum, radiating fully-formed from
betwixt the ears of the design-genius. It has to communicate with the
consumer, and that communication has to be effective. It's a similar sort of
attitude that we see amongst bad programmers, insisting that day-to-day
programming has nothing to do with mathematics.

Example: a bad designer would say that abstract paintings can mean anything. A
painting of overlapping dark blue orbs could represent anger, or frustration,
or happiness. Such a statement would be not only be completely wrong, but
downright troubling as to the artists' culturally insensitivity. In Occidental
culture, we often use bright reds to represent anger and frustration, and
light blues and pinks make happy feelings.

Another example: in Japanese culture, white is often symbolic of death. If
you're designing a hero character, you will either refrain from dressing the
character in white, or you will intentionally dress the character in white,
knowing that you seek to make the character an anti-hero. But you cannot
effectively make that decision unless you understand the visual language of
that culture.

The extent to which design cannot be codified by a designer is the extent to
which that designer does not understand the culture for which she or he is
designing. Every element of design is communicating a piece of information.
_Every_ element. That the designer does not understand _what_ a particular
element is communicating -- either at all or only on a subconscious level --
does not change the fact that it is there.

Art and science are not mutually exclusive pursuits, they are fundamentally
intertwined parts of the creation and understanding process. Even advanced
quantum and particle physics requires some level of art in designing
experiments. Or did you think that those folk at CERN know exactly how to
prove and disprove every hypothesis they come up with?

Even Einstein knew a thing or two about design: "It can scarcely be denied
that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements
as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate
representation of a single datum of experience.", which we often summarize by
saying, "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."

~~~
joe_the_user
You know...

Can you cite have _any_ example of someone even vaguely within the design
world who would say _"abstract paintings can mean anything"_?

Overall, I don't think there are many working professionals in any field who
don't believe there is _any_ structure to their work.

I would strongly suspect that designers who lean on intuitive processes will
still tell you there's a structure to effective expression but that they use
their intuition to gain access to it. They may be wrong to rely on their
intuition gain access to this structure but you're misrepresenting them if you
claim they simply believe there are no rules.

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sudont
Good taste, iteration, and eating your own dogfood goes a long way.

Design isn't some unattainable skill, and people new to it can still do a good
job designing stuff. It's more like an opinion, sure, some people have such a
correct track record with their opinions that they can make a good career out
of it.

Taking a cognizant viewpoint and crystallizing it though iteration is do-able.
Just make sure you've got good taste.

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protomyth
I would imagine automated design tools will work about as good as CASE
(Computer-aided software engineering) tools. Ok for a limited set of areas,
but nothing really inspiring.

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kunjaan
<http://imgur.com/5KaU2.png>

