Toward a Philosophy of Design

Abstract: I here adumbrate some aspect of my own general philosophy of “design.” I promote a business strategy that I refer to as both “pragmatist” and “phenomenological”: I define what I mean by “custom design” as a type of continuous responsiveness to user experience.

Some notes toward a philosophy of design: one must begin and end with experience. Simply put, the quality of experience for a given user viz. any interface, object, design, etc. is the Godhead toward which all other priorities ought to be sacrificed. This releases one from certain sterile debates, such as form vs. function, in an effort to map out a more general-economic approach: it takes seriously the idea that form and function reach different pitches and thresholds in relation to one another, contexts, users, etc., and that there is a time to celebrate and prioritize form just as there is a time to celebrate and prioritize function. The design philosophy would here fall somewhere between pragmatism and phenomenology. “Custom” and “customization” means: start with experience; do what works to maximize experience. Take into consideration what a user explicitly wants; observe how they inexplicitly act; find some balance between the two dimensions that mutually increases both aspects. The hope: to get a user to feel that their wants are satisfied while also surprised to find new wants fulfilled—wants of which they themselves were previously unaware. “I never knew I wanted/needed that; I never knew that X could feel like this, could be so good, etc.; so this is what X is really supposed to be like; etc.”—it is moments of deep appreciation like this that a design ought to strive to draw out from its user base.

But what does it mean to “maximize experience”? Here another component of the design philosophy must be addressed, namely in the management of attention. Or: a great deal of design is the appropriate distribution of attention. We might think of this management/distribution in terms of a three-node spectrum: first, the idea of negative or enervating attention; second, the idea of non-attention or offloaded attention (see, for instance, the philosophy of the “Norman door”); third, the idea of positive or energizing attention.

As to the first node, this is the type of attention to be universally avoided; it is the attention that draws one out of oneself/an experience, that offers itself as a burden, a frustration, a problem, etc. Here the problem might root in form or function: a device may not work, an image fall entirely flat, an object fail to fulfill its intended end. The great criticisms in this realm run the gamut from “It does not work” to the visceral rejection of “eww.” This type of attention makes one aware of an object/environment in the negative—e.g. as something to be addressed, fixed; a problem, a nuisance, a friction; something to be avoided or used “only when absolutely needed.”

The second node is structured around the idea of offloading attention/burden as much as possible: a type of experiential neutrality, the “Norman philosophy” that a door is designed best when it does not appear as/is not felt as a door, when it becomes “invisible” against the greater ecosystem/backdrop. The idea here is that attention is usually a deficit: to have to think about or reflect on how to use a door often results in a type of cut or break in the natural flow of things, one that most users would likely want to avoid more often than not. Addressing the general matrix of problems the first node above announced, the idea here might be an attempt to keep a user unaware of their actual using. Thus, doors that don’t even register as doors, that offer a seamless, nuanced experience against a greater flow, are the highest ideal. Convenience, usability, satisfaction are all centered around a type of mitigation and minimization of undue attention: “working” is cast against a greater infrastructure of activity, such that a door “works” when it is seen and considered within a larger frame of activity/reference. Not quite “Out of sight, out of mind,” but rather “In sight but still out of mind”—might be the promotional ideal underlining this node.

The third node manages attention to maximize an experience in itself; to draw focus to certain elements, objects, dimensions, etc.; to manufacture and sublimate awareness, to make one aware in a new or more efficient/effective way. The principle here is that matching the right type of attention to the appropriate object/activity does not restrict or burden, but actually helps to facilitate, catalyze, etc. Under the aegis of a more “general economy/phenomenology”, ideas like “synergy” and “feedback loops” between sets of activities come to the fore. Some examples: the Herman-Miller Embody office chair; the Logitech G915 TKL keyboard; the Klipsch Heritage HP-3 headphones.

What does the Embody ultimately achieve? A world-standard in engineering and quality of material/product, yes; a unique and aesthetic design, yes; but it is the interrelation of these aspects that ascends to produce an experience that is greater, so to speak, than the sum of its raw material parts. Or: the Embody transforms the act of sitting from one that is prone to frustration/pain far beyond the experience of neutrality, even, and into the realm of something even fun. One of the selling points is that the chair actually promotes blood circulation and thus is one of the few pieces of furniture that one could acquire that improves one’s health—instead of merely improving one’s comfort. The Embody transforms and transubstantiates—redeems, so to speak—a quotidian act, an act usually seen or felt as a means to some other end (e.g. one does not just sit in an office chair just to sit), as a higher-act, as an end in itself. One could almost sit in the Embody as itself an activity, in the way one might sit in a dedicated lounge chair, and this would not be radical or without merit. The same is true of the Logitech and Klipsch: the former makes typing itself a rewarding and interesting experience; the latter makes not only listening to music a higher-order activity (the general promise and hope of virtually any headphone), but simply putting on and wearing the headphones themselves as a type of aesthetic experience. All three examples are predicated on an extraordinary attention to sensory detail: look, feel, sound, etc. are all considered and balanced through the selection of materials and manufacturing quality.

The great irony here is that, by designing these items to be ends in themselves alongside their usual functionalities, e.g. alongside their instrumental and means-oriented nature, a user may experience an overall feedback loop that improves general environmental/labor functionality in total. Or: rather than slowing down operations and drawing a user out of themselves unnecessarily or in a costly manner, focusing the right type of attention upon usual means, sublimating those means into ends, actually increases their overall effect as means; as each element in a given ecosystem approaches this threshold, we should expect an exponential increase in overall user satisfaction. If the end-goal is an overall increase in productivity for a given user, for instance, then the consideration of the engineer ought to in large part be on the overall functioning of the user’s environment: an itemization of activities, points of contact, so on and so forth that, in their overall estimation, help sublimate each feature/element/dimension of a user’s experience into a synergistic matrix of mutually-reinforcing objects/actions.  Creating excellent and user-oriented objects is a large part of the process—but it is a part that must be complimented by considering things like object-activity overlap, where objects and activities in an environment share a systemic “energy” and “direction,” so to speak. Of course, this focus of attention must arise out of the needs of the environment itself and must be ever-responsive to the lived experience of the user. It is in this sense that we speak of cohesive environments, environments that flow, aesthetic environments vs. fractured, uncomfortable, ugly spaces, and so on.

While it would seem that this last, positive node ought to generally dictate one’s design ideology and overall manufacturing philosophy more than the neutral or negative nodes, it is of course conceivable that a particularly clever engineer may even incorporate the neutral and negative nodes as subfeatures of a greater positive experience. And so in the management of attention, in the right contexts and against the needs of the right users, neutral and unburdened experience, even negative experience, might be employed, controlled or corralled in the overall vision of a general flow. To this end, one cannot discount any aspect of user experience as a priori “off the table”: considering how things like frustration, anger, pain or sadness operate within an overall ecosystem, whether these things are necessary to that ecosystem, etc., becomes part of the designer’s continuous process of auditing the reality in which they work. While overall a great deal of success should be met by keeping one’s designs within the space of the neutral and positive nodes, one can imagine how certain “deep” experiences are animated by a greater breadth of emotional range and engage the space of negativity as well; simply, it is far too utilitarian to presuppose or assume that a user only seeks after functionality, or form, or convenience, etc. The designer must be open to the possibility of mobilizing the full orchestra of human emotion toward the construction of a given experience/object/end. Next to sheer and unflinching “quality,” “adaptability” and “resourcefulness” ought to sit in the designer’s quiver as among the most trustworthy and reliable of standards.