How can design theory enhance design practice?

How you can design, through the design theories and methodologies?

Ali Haririan

2019

School of Digital Technologies, Tallinn University

Intro

This is a major question that comes to the mind of every fresh student in the field. All these theories and methods are useful or they just tighten your hands and mind? Actually this is not just a matter of students, even the professionals are asking the same question. As we see in the ’70s, researchers and scientists didn’t accept the design methodologies in the first place. They believed these methods and frameworks are not helpful to the design process and the designer cannot achieve anything creative out of these methods. Moreover, in their mind design was just a matter of innovation, not following the predefined steps to achieve the solution. Therefore, in this essay, I want to take a look at this question from the point of view of a master HCI student.

First of all, what is design? Are we on the same page?

The design has very different meanings and definitions, but first of all, let see what is not necessary design?

Design is not just about creating beauty, although we should think of the aesthetics when we are designing. And on the other hand, the design is not all about ideas. Actually “professional designers do not focus on the generation of “the Idea”: they approach problems in a very strategic, deliberate and thoughtful way” ( Kees Dorst Frame Innovation). But what is design exactly? Design is a rational procedure of finding or creating a solution to a problem based on logical analyzed information that is happening in the creative mind of a designer. And of course, we need to be precise about the meaning of the problem itself. Some say any kind of difficulties in our everyday life could be a problem. I agree and disagree with this perception at the same time. For instance, if you are looking for a parking slot around a mall on a Saturday night, and you cannot find it, well that’s not a problem because you already know the solution: you have to keep looking to find a slot. Problems occur when something blocks our normal flow of how we deal with the issue in life and we don’t know how to progress. Moreover, a designer most of the time needs to observe the “problem space” and not just the problem itself.

So who is a designer? Everyone?

We have all the problems in our lives. So If we can find a solution to the problem, it makes us a designer? The interesting point is that sometimes people use the design methodology without they know it. For example, you can see all the time people talking while they are trying to solve a problem. And this reflective conversation with the situation and talk-back is an important part of reframing the problem while you are trying to understand it or even solve it. This reflection-in-action is a really useful tool for a designer to cope with complicated situations. But If we consider this irrational approach as a design process, then everyone could be a designer; Even the ones with the profession of problem-solving are not designers necessarily, as the induction and deduction are not designed. Therefore, I disagree with this. As I mentioned before, a designer should have great analytic skills so he can observe the elements, gather the information about reasoning patterns and find a logical relationship from those two and the outcome. A designer should be able to use methodologies, tools, and frameworks to avoid wasting time and achieve a reasonable result in the design process. Otherwise, if you can solve a problem just by your innovation and creativity, it would be lucky and you cannot repeat this success again, or it would be a time-consuming process. Because success has nothing to do with luck. You have to be an educated designer with those abilities to design and to analyze phenomena. And we have different types of the designer by their level of expertise. In this essay, we use the word “designer” as an expert designer.

And the big question: Are these frameworks and methodologies useful after all?

When we are talking about the design methodology, the first thing that comes to mind is some predefined steps and rules which are necessary to achieve a goal. If we look at methodology from this point of view it makes us disappointed. Because with using a methodology alone, you will face a very time-consuming process which not guarantee the quality of your design’s result, and most of the time you end up abandoning the methodology and sticking to your own made-up way of design. Hence, if we want to use a method you need to know that you can apply the method or the framework relative to the situation. Methods and frameworks are designed to help you through the process of design not make it harder for you. So, in my opinion, you should always be able to mutate or enhance a part of a method by your need. And in this case, you don’t feel stuck with a useless old method. We can apply this approach to the key of design abduction which is “framing”. A frame is really vital for creating a new approach to the problem situation. Moreover, it is really useful as a social entity and helps stakeholders within a problem situation. With the act of framing as a hypothetical pattern of relationship, we can see the problem space from a new point of view and it makes us able to predict new possible problems and have a more precise solution that leads us to an outcome. But the problem with these frames is that they need to be fresh to work in their best functionality. Once the frame is accepted, it begins to fade immediately. So it is the designer's job to create new frames for each problem or solution space and don’t stick with the frames that methodology provides. The design methodology is not that rigid as we can see even the desired outcome can mutate with the adoption of a new frame. And the desired outcome is based on the values we gave it to start our design process. And even these values can change along with the changing of the outcome.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I can recommend the design methodology as a necessary part of the design. First of all, it can help us avoid going through unprofessional time-consuming ways of design. And then it could be important to see a new dimension of problem and solution that we are not able to see without these methods. But we need to keep this in mind that these methodologies are not the Holy Bible to a designer. We can use them through the process as tools. And not use them to give our work some educated credits. Which in that case they are not useful but time consuming, disappointing and unnecessary.