Make Something Meaningful: Reviewing The Soul of Design

My team and I recently completed completed The Soul of Design by Lee Devin and Robert Austin. This book is a delightfully fresh perspective in a sea of lookalike content. If you’re anything like me, you’ll treasure this rare, captivating and inspiring work.

Here are a few thoughts to hopefully persuade you of this book’s value.

In The Soul of Design, Austin and Devin take an unconventional look at product design, and specifically the extraordinary products.

The Soul of Design closely examines how designers achieve the intangible feeling of “Wow” users feel when they first experience an extraordinarily designed product. They label this emotion “affective significance”. The authors determine that a physical quality of successful products, resonance, is achieved through careful plotting the interaction of various components and trajectory - whether (or not) the relationships between components fulfill the viewer’s subconscious expectations based on the patterns the product has displayed.

For Devin and Austin, successful product design supersedes market dynamics, feature lists, and slick marketing. For them, successful products tell powerful stories. In their paradigm, successful design is the composition of elements, arranged delightfully and coherently, like a captivating novel or intoxicating sonata.

The Soul of Design also includes examples of how designers these wow moments and outlines how design managers can create environments conducive to their teams consistently achieving exceptional results.

The Soul of Design also discusses the conflict between conventional business principles and the real world process of achieving great design, and illustrates how great products can seemingly defy conventional business rules.

If you’re disappointed because The Soul of Design doesn’t discuss the application of traditional design principles and methods, you’re probably missing the point.  This book, in the examination of every type of product from jazz music, to trash cans, to movies like “The Sixth Sense”, is about the instinctive reaction of human beings to products. I highly recommend this book for designers looking for a fresh perspective on product design, for managers looking for insight on creating work environments that enable great products to be built, and any artist who wants to move their audience.

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The Soul of Design - Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products

By Lee Devin and Robert D. Austin

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=11662