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THE BLOGDesign Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things
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Design is Communication. Duh.
There’s a common adage among graphic designers that goes, “My mother doesn’t understand what I do.” Some designers have a hard time explaining that when creating a magazine layout, for example, they don’t take the photograph, paint the picture, write the article, or draw the typeface. What they do is organize elements on the page, a process that largely involves choosing, scaling, cropping, and otherwise adjusting readymade elements. Explaining the value of this process to outsiders can be tough. But guess what: it’s our job. Because design is communication. What this means is not just that design artifacts convey values and ideas to people (which they do), but rather that the design process is a constant conversation about what we’re making, why we’re making it, and what the end result should be. We are continually explaining our intentions to clients, printers, fabricators, bosses, underlings, and collaborators. Failing to do so means the job doesn’t get done right. The final product needs to communicate ideas and values to end users, but on the road to getting there, countless conversations are taking place about what needs to be done. Design emerged as an alternative to craft during the Industrial Revolution when artisans began giving instructions to the factory (often in the form of drawings) about how a product would be made. In contrast, the craftsman was making things directly in his own workshop, requiring less mediation. I’ve seen the failure to communicate in my own kitchen, when my husband and I recently gave some rather vague drawings to a cabinet maker. We figured he would work out the details, and of course he did—his way, not the way we had been imagining in our heads. But a cabinet maker can’t see inside a designer’s head, which is why precise, descriptive drawings serve to convey intention. I’ve seen the failure to communicate in my classroom, when a vaguely worded assignment yields confused and muddled results from students. I’ve seen the failure to communicate in client meetings, when the “wrong design” gets picked instead of the one I wanted. (Bad designs shouldn’t have made it to the meeting in the first place.) But all said and done, I’m pretty sure my mother understands what I do, because we’ve been talking about it for over twenty years. — Ellen Lupton · 2008-10-03 |