

When design doesn't matter - mijustin
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/bb29af1b5866

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hcarvalhoalves
Too narrow definition of what "design" is. Tip: it's not about "looks nice".

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mijustin
Yes, I'm deliberately focusing on "visual design" or "how a product looks" in
this post.

But I think you've pointed out something poignant: for many, design is "making
something look good".

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hcarvalhoalves
Sorry, but it's believed even visual (the right term is "graphic") design is
indirectly related to "how a product looks" in the sense you use it ("art").

Function is fundamentally undetachable from form, so a poorly designed product
can't truly be said to look good. It can just have varying degrees of fitness.

I highly recommend reading "Notes on the synthesis of form" by Christopher
Alexander. It might blown your mind on what you consider design. I feel this
word is tossed around a lot but few realize what it can entail.

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mijustin
Thanks. I'll read it.

The idea that a _poorly designed product can't truly be said to look good_
seems subjective. Could you elaborate? (Especially on how this might relate to
digital design?)

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hcarvalhoalves
> The idea that a poorly designed product can't truly be said to look good
> seems subjective. Could you elaborate?

It would help if you had read the book, it's the kind of thing that "snaps",
but I'll try to condense it:

Think about forms as physical manifestations of the underlying forces acting
on it. A good example I once heard is thinking about a water drop: if you take
a picture of one, you can explain why it has the shape it has because that's
the result of all the laws of physics acting on it at that moment. And because
of that, it really couldn't have a different form than it has, unless you bend
the laws of nature. It's the purest form possible.

Analogously, a human-designed artifact is a physical (or otherwise)
manifestation of the underlying forces acting on it (which would be the
requisites). In a concrete example, if you were designing a kettle, that would
be all the things you need to optimize for: it should be placed atop a oven;
it should have such and such size to fit in a cabinet; it should allow water
to heat; it should allow someone to grab it without burning their hands; and
so on.

As you can imagine, it is _really hard_ to enumerate all the required (and
often conflicting) requisites. For instance, if I were designing an artifact
for heating water without stating that it should be placed atop a oven, I
could arrive at a completely different form (e.g.: faucet heater). The obvious
takeaway is that design, as a creative discipline, is only as good as the
number of requisites a designer manages to contemplate and successfully meet
(let's call it the "fitness function").

Therefore, for all collection of requisites (underlying forces), a perfect
artifact with 100% fitness should exist (purest form). If that's true, then
good design can be judged objectively by its "fitness function", quantifying
how well it meets the proposed criteria, or how far it steers away from the
"purest form". Better yet, if we devise an ideal design process, these optimal
forms themselves could emerge from the requisites (that is Christopher
Alexander's research, and from there it gets heavily philosophical).

To wrap it up, when you say an UI "looks good" at first glance, you are mainly
judging the artistic prowess on it (which _is_ subjective). The real judgment
of the design though is in how well it meets the requisites (fitness, or how
far away it steers from an ideal UI). So when you use said UI, you are judging
the design when you quantify: how intelligible it is, how well it allows you
to do what you need to do, and so on (since those are the raisons d'etre of
UIs). And yes, eye candy can very well _be_ one of these criteria. In fact,
that's the criteria most products are optimized for, subconsciously, mainly
because it's the easiest to quantify (designer shows the design to client,
gauges emotional response, iterate). Hence why our confusion between design
and eye candy.

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mijustin
This is helpful, thank you.

Based on this definition of _fitness_ how would we evaluate the design of
Craigslist, Comic Sans, and the Drudge Report?

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hcarvalhoalves
> Based on this definition of fitness how would we evaluate the design of
> Craigslist, Comic Sans, and the Drudge Report?

Fitness would be a function of how well the realization maps to the problem
domain. That is, how far these are from an ideal Craiglist, Comic Sans and
Drudge Report that would each fulfill all the required criteria.

It's impossible to evaluate detached from a collection of requisites. _That_
is the hard part. Christopher Alexander proposes a (mathematical) method for
collecting these requisites and deriving a design from it by building a direct
graph, study the relationships by grouping it, then realizing it by building
in successive layers, but not the reverse (taking a realization and working
your way backwards).

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Zweihander
Good design embodies good functionality. The two should go hand in hand.

You don't need your web hosting provider to look good on the backend as long
as everything you need is there and fairly easily find-able (and that itself
is good design). Doesn't matter if they provide an awesome service if you
can't set it up and use it quickly and efficiently.

You also want your front-end consumer-facing application to look good,
especially if you're trying to disrupt a market rather than create a new one.

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mijustin
The challenge is that the definition of "what is design" (especially on the
web) keeps evolving.

I think a good product embodies _just enough_ design + engineering to make
something useful.

The risk, specifically with visual design, is that we can "over-design" (in
the same way that we can over-engineer).

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SolarUpNote
Design matters. Decoration doesn't necessarily matter.

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bradleyland
The title is actually "When design doesn't matter", which is materially
different than "Design doesn't matter".

