Decoding Design

The many faces of modern design – and why it matters.

How do you feel about workplace jargon? I think it drives most people – me included – absolutely up the wall. But more than half of people admit to using it themselves, often because they think it’ll help them to fit in.

What a sorry state of affairs. No wonder the Plain English Campaign was established in 1978. I guess we’re all still on a journey… woops, sorry. We still have a long way to go.

The world of design and innovation isn’t immune to this phenomenon. The development of design as a profession and the evolution of different approaches for different challenges has led to a confusing miasma of tags and sub-categories of design which could bamboozle anyone not in the know.

So it is that we have things like human-centred design, people-centred design, inclusive design, systems-aware design and various others. How anyone who isn’t a designer is meant to understand this is beyond me.

I get that it isn’t intentional. If you know your way around the design world the definitions of these phrases are likely to be pretty clear.

For anyone who doesn’t, I thought it might be worth setting out a few examples with some background. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an essay on design history.

Winston Churchill created the Design Council Council – still a very influential and important organisation – in 1944. It was set up to tackle the huge challenge of getting Britain back on its feet after the Second World War. Eagle-eyed readers will now be spluttering that the war didn’t end until 1945; but clearly Churchill was very confident, very organised, or possibly a bit of both.

But design isn’t limited to driving economic progress. As a species we’re relying heavily on design (and engineering, and innovation, and science, and others…) to find new ways to feed, clothe and shelter us without destroying the planet we live on. The horse may have bolted on that one, of course, but design will have a key role to play in leading it back to the stable.

These are just two examples of where design can deliver critical benefit, so it makes sense to assume that a uniform approach isn’t going to work in every circumstance. You’d be right, and this is where the challenge lies in opening the world of design to a relatively lay audience.

So here it is – the Defankle Innovation mini-glossary of design terms, in chronological order.

1850-1900 Industrial Design?

Industrial design is, in essence, design for mass production. The commercial value of design as a skill ultimately created design as a profession. “The Practical Draughtsman's Book of Industrial Design”, was printed in 1853. Claude Sintel, a self-proclaimed industrial designer, is credited with first using the term “industrial design” in 1919.?

1944 Design Council established?

Big challenges need a big response, and after seven years of war and brutal bombardment of UK ports and cities, Britain was in need of a big response. The Design Council was born.

1958 Human-Centred Design?

Even though it’s a new concept for a lot of people, human-centred design has been around since 1958. It’s been responsible for ensuring that products (and to some extent services, policies etc) are desirable as well as technically feasible and commercially viable. Human-centred design supported the growth of consumerism. It lends itself well to linear models of supply and consumption.?

1977 User-Centred Design?

In a similar way to human-centred design, although there is no fixed approach, user-centred methods tend to involve empathy with how someone will use a given thing. Techniques feature iteration and often involve prototyping and direct collaboration or even ‘co-design’ practices (working directly with the likely end users to design the final product). A good way to think of it is this: human-centred design has a bias towards desirability, user-centred design places a heavier emphasis on usability.?

1987 Sustainable Design

After the first definitions of sustainable development emerged in the late 1980s. Design was recognised as an area of major importance in the journey towards more responsible and sustainable production and consumption models.

During the 1990’s life-cycle models of product development emerged and much of the focus centred on physical products (things that had to be manufactured). By the late 1990’s eco-design emerges as predominant approach to reduce environmental impact at each stage of the life-cycle.

1994 Inclusive Design

There’s a British Standard for inclusive design which describes it like this: ?

“The design of mainstream products or services that are accessible to and useable by as many people as reasonably possible... without the need for special adaptation or specialised design.” ?

The common misconception is this only relates to disability of some kind. The reality is that it applies to all dimensions of what we now call diversity, including things like gender, age, ethnic origin, sexual orientation and other characteristics. I’ve written before about this before with some examples – check out my previous posts.

1990s People-Centred Design?

Understandably, people-centred design is often used interchangeably with human-centred design – it’s usually considered to be a tenet of human-centred design. The key difference is that people-centred design emphasises the context of people’s situations and cultures, rather than their specific actions. It’s a hard one to get right without proper research to really understand the people in question.

People-centred design is often used when designing for a community or groups of people outside their usual frame of reference. That could include designing safe use spaces for drug addicts or developing transport links for island communities. Critical to this approach is spending enough time understanding the communities and how they work – this is in comparison to human-centred design or user-centred design, which focuses more on individuals.?

2001? Regenerative design

I’m not sure completely when the term “Regenerative design” emerged as it’s so integral to the concept of permaculture (permanent agriculture or architecture) – a concept first established in 1979. Rather than minimising impact on the environment, regenerative design takes a more restorative approach, working with nature to prioritise and repair, intentionally, carefully and respectfully improving social and ecological systems through design. Awareness around the approach is building, and it’s a well-established concept in architecture. Although new to modern western ways of working, these ‘progressive’ approaches have been around in other for millennia.

2021 Systemic Design

Design Council ?launched the System Design Framework to help designers work on complex interdisciplinary and cross-sector challenges.?The framework today cites the climate emergency and the associated social injustice as urgent imperatives for considering interconnected systems – the idea that designers have a responsibility to consider the planet and all its people as key stakeholders in their work.

2021 Systems-Aware Design

Just as no person is an island, no product or service exists in a vacuum. Systems-aware design encompass systemic design but also borrows from other disciplines such as complexity science, economics and systems engineering to appropriately address complexity. Systems-aware design places focus on understanding the interdependencies between the design artefact and the systems it connects to. ?Rather than just thinking about the end user, the designer uses a range of methods to explicitly and intentionally consider the impact on and effect of relevant systems. In addition to people and end-users, a systems-aware designer might consider legacy systems, infrastructure, organisations, political and social systems, the life cycle, waste systems, systems dynamics and emergent behaviours – among other things. The front-end planning in a systems-aware design project is critical to identify and understand as many connected systems as possible, avoiding unintended consequences or missed opportunities.

So what??

Churchill’s acknowledgement in the 1940s of the importance of design gives us some pause for thought. It’s easy to think that it all seemed so simple then, but rose-tinted specs rarely show the whole story. I see it as a positive that we’ve been able to identify and understand design’s role in and impact on the world around us, as a more nuanced and flexible way to solve the problems faced by modern societies.

Maybe it’s not too much to expect that one of these approaches could tackle the issue of confusing jargon. Maybe explaining design as strictly human-centred already ambitious enough. I happen to think there’s merit in identifying how different design approaches can be applied to important challenges – it helps to frame our approach to a problem early in the process. We just need to be remember what design is there to do, and do our best not to confuse the life out of everyone else.

Sources

Colomina, B. & Wigley, M., 2018. are we human? notes on an archaeology of design. Zu?rich: Lars Mu?ller Publishers.

Norman, D. A., 2005. Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful. Interactions, XII(4), pp. 14-19. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1070960.1070976

Norman, D. A., 2007. Peter in Conversation with Don Norman About UX & Innovation [Interview] (13 December 2007) https://huffduffer.com/clagnut/370516?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/design?

Armengaud, C. and Johnson, W., 1853.?The practical draughtsman's book of industrial design: forming a complete course of mechanical, engineering, and architectural drawing. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.?

https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/who-we-are/our-history/

The History of Inclusive Design in the UK (2015),? Clarkson P. J.,? Coleman R., Applied Ergonomics, Volume 46, PartB.?https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.002?

British Standards Document BS 7000-6 Design management systems. Managing inclusive design. Guide https://doi.org/10.3403/03208286U

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/people-centered-design?

Beyond NetZero: A systemic apporach (2021) Design Council.?https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/systemic-design-framework/?

https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-events/design-for-planet-festival/