George: Design

One of my biggest difficulties with design is its fuzziness. While going through the design process in UOCD it was hard to get a clear picture of what the hell was going on. Why do we care about what the user’s dreams and aspirations? What’s the deal with the deliverables – are they supposed to be pretty or not? Why is Ben making us do these silly things? Most of it just didn’t come together in a way that, at the time, felt right.

It turns out that the only way to learn design is to do it. It’s not something you can define as a whole and slowly work your way into; the question ‘what is design?’ doesn’t seem to have any instructive answers outside of the context of design. While do-learn is the way we like to do things at Olin, most subjects involve small spurts of doing and learning in quick succession. This is do-learn pushed to the limit, where you have to go through the entire process without any real understanding of what’s happening and then, once you’re done, look back and learn from it. From that perspective I realize that everything we did, no matter how fuzzy, had a useful purpose and that it all came together to form something that, in the context of our user group, simply worked. Both the elegance of the solution and the problem itself could not have come about without the fuzziness implicit in the design process and our resulting understanding of our users.

At the highest level design is, to me, a way of thinking. It is an approach to a problem that is open to anything and everything yet deeply analytical of any inputs, always looking for connections and explanations within context; a way of starting with nothing and getting to something valuable. It is always asking questions about what you are doing and why you are doing it. There is, however, no judgement, as often it is the seemingly stupid or impossible ideas that bring about the most creative and sensible ones.

It is because of its fuzziness that I love design.