Yes, but is it any good?

One of the most interesting issues that cropped up in discussions with various conference speakers was that of design quality, and how to assess it. Success in design has generally been measured by either recognition from peers in design awards or through sales triumphs – preferably both. Both these yardsticks are being challenged, but without any real replacements being offered.

When I asked Chris Downs at Live|Work how service design should be assessed, he wasn’t sure, but was equally sure that traditional measures of the sales curve and the design award, did not make the grade either. He speculated that service design quality might be better judged on ‘triple-bottom-line’ criteria by multiple-stakeholders. I have to say that I’m not sure what that means in theory or practice.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, said that design thinking was about new problems, new methods and new ways of assessing design. When I asked about the new assessment criteria, he also wasn’t sure and said that this is still being worked out.

The now defunct RED unit of the Design Council, then led by Hilary Cottam, went even further in arguing in a paper called Transformation Design, that designers should get over their perfectionist obsession with slick outputs when involved co-design projects:

'The designer can no longer see themselves as the arbiter of design quality, defining what ‘good design’ is. Instead, what’s working and worth developing further defines what’s good enough. That decision, too, is made by a more diverse range of contributors. This can be unsettling to the design-trained because, as design practitioners have found, ‘including un-trained designers in design work changes the outcome of the solution. Often, we are finding, these outcomes have better staying power, but are not as ‘slick’.’

Unsurprisingly many ‘traditional’ designers raise their eyebrows about such ideas of ‘good enough’ design. Others question the quality of thinking and outputs of the work going on at the fringes of design practice.

However, what’s really interesting about this debate is that not only is the concept of good design being challenged, but also whether design quality should be our ultimate focus. For example, as I mention in an article in October’s Blueprint magazine, changing people’s behaviour has become central to many public service design briefs and therefore the its main success criteria. Also as sustainability is increasingly accepted as a new ethical framework, design is being gauged from a very different standpoint. For example Chris Downs is appalled that the design industry perennially lauds Apple, as ‘they produce landfill’.

I wonder if there anyone out there still willing to put the case for design excellence for design’s sake – a creative and cultural act – with out the need to justify its worth on social or ethical grounds?

Comments

[Steve Portigal]

You might judge design based on outcomes. That could be sales. It could be cultural changes. New behaviours enabled. Influence on the work of others. Etc.

[Simon Rucker]

I've always been unconvinced of designers being the best arbiters of design quality, ever since college when the slick rendering was invariably held in higher esteem than the thoughtful but less glib solution. And in the real world, things like the annual D&AD awards do make you wonder at the need for so much self-congratulatory backslapping.

Show me a designer who really gets all the complex issues that contribute to the success of a project and I’ll show you someone who knows they get more money and satisfaction working in strategy rather than design. And by the same token, the reliance on sales figures is also too simplistic, as it discounts the role distribution, price, communications, etc. play in the eventual commercial success or failure of the thing in question.

Chris Downs is right, I think, when he says that multiple stakeholders have a say, because good design attempts to balance their many, often competing, requirements in any given project. In fact good design has everyone cheering: supply chain, for engaging with the realities of production; the customer, for helping address issues such as distribution and warehousing; marketeers or senior management for helping build the brand and make a profit; and consumers/users for hopefully also satisfying their needs/desires. But the required balance between these is usually different for every project: that for a successful FMCG pack design is very different from, say, a successful luxury accessory.

The one thing they almost certainly have in common is that there was a great brief in the first place, and not least because the criteria for success were probably spelled out in black and white. In other words it’s the writer of the brief who defines what good design is and how it will be measured. After all, who else has the same breadth and depth of understanding of all the issues that would allow them to make a more objective decision? I know a good brief is a rare thing and designers firmly believe in their right to question them at every level, but even the best designer is still only the recipient of the brief, not its author.

And therein lies the problem: outside of the project team who ever knows what the brief actually was when passing judgments about this product or that service. Lack of this most vital piece of info reduces all our pontifications to guesstimates. And as for the plea for design for design’s sake, in my experience that tends to come from people who believe there is an unassailable link between quality design and their own personal tastes, and that’s hardly a recipe for informed debate now is it?

[Nick Bell]

A number of the RED unit's design projects did not result in any visual outcome. For instance, for their health projects, success was measured in terms of whether people managed to change their own behaviour and sustain it for long enough to improve their health.

The way designers craft a piece of design by trying things out, testing and doing it again over and over was used by the designers at RED. Except in this case the object of their attentions was not something visual but people's lives; their daily activities and interactions with public services. Something they couldn't do without the people themselves involved. A way of thinking used by designers applied to private and public situations with the help of those at the sharp end.

In this context the criteria for what is good design is "what’s working and worth developing further" as Cottam says. This kind of practice expands what design as a discipline is and what it can do. I think that is exciting.