Has the definition of “good design” changed over time?
The history of product design is shorter than a lot of people think it is. Or rather, I should say “the history of industrialized, mass production consumer products is rather short.” In the book, “Understanding Industrial Design”, Simon King concluded that
“It was the rapid improvement of manufacturing capabilities during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that signaled the radical shift to mass production of identical goods. For the first time, the act of design became separated from the act of making.”
— Chapter One A Brief History of Industrial Design and Interaction Design
He went on to say that it was driven by this technology and production revolution, the field of industrial design emerged to specialize in the design of commercial products that appealed to a broad audience and could be manufactured at scale. Industrial design has then started to separate itself from craftsmanship with a different aim to satisfy the needs of a large population. So the 18th and 19th century can be seen as the booming era of product design and business owners start to realize that form and function should not be considered separately.
In the 20th century, it was not until the business impact of design was uncovered that this subject had become a critical part of the product development process. Pioneers like Raymond Loewy have shown the world that customers will favor a product not only because of its low cost and excellent functions, but also the style and emotional attachment that comes with it. Nevertheless, a user-centric product development strategy was still rather a novel idea at the time. Business owners bring in graphic designers to work on their brands and industrial designers (often have a background in architecture design) to make their product look better but also easier to use. As more and more electric products found their way into every household, designers, all in a sudden, find themselves in huge demand(a similar thing is happening right now in the digital world, you can find reports illustrate design’s impact on business everywhere, check out this one from McKinsey). New manufacturing technologies, new materials, new design tools, every technology breakthrough opened a new arena for designers to flex their design muscles and compete to come up with the best practices. Many principles are carried over but more are completely abandoned very soon after the first adoption.
History repeats itself and evolution often brings us to a full circle. The information revolution has brought us to a new digital era and almost all industries are stumbling into this transformation. A new form of “soft” products, with no physical form, compatible with various (if not all) devices and updated frequently with no cost to the consumers. All in a sudden, having a user-friendly app, or website is not an addition but a necessity. Do you remember how you pay your credit card bills 20 yrs ago? Would you even imagine about doing it with just a few taps on your phone? Smartphones, tablets, internet, 4G/5G network has now created a new medium for an entirely new category of product. Similar to what happened in the 20th century, at the brink of the 21st century, designers needed to quickly translate their design knowledge and skills from “hard” products to “soft” products. So how many of the principles are still applicable? Can Dieter Rams’s 10 timeless commandments for good design still be used on digital products? Does software design really share the same fundamentals with hardware design? Should interaction design be considered more as a branch of information design or product design? All these questions are still waiting for answers from us, a new generation of product designers shaping the new product experience for all consumers across all sectors.
Going down the list of Ram’s commandments, I found it astonishing that all of them are still 100% applicable to “soft” products, and almost all of them are still inspiring interface designers in various aspects. Take this one for example, “good design makes a product understandable”. It’s an awfully blunt statement but represents one of the biggest challenges in design. The understandability of a system relies on convention, recall, and consistency. For something completely new, there’s simply no established convention in the field for a long time and designers rely heavily on Resemblance to make user interfaces easy to understand.
It was very much wild west for designers and all we had was this set of fundamental rules that are used to define product design throughout history. Technology revolution, from touchscreens, smartphones, tablets in the late 20th century to smart appliances, ML/AI, AR/VR in the 21st century, all posed massive opportunities for defining user-friendly human-computer interactive experiences from ground zero. For instances, iconography went through the “skeuomorphism” at the early stage so that users can quickly associate these icons with the function of their real-world counterparts.
Soon, these complex, ultra-detailed icons become unnecessary and designers realized that users were able to recognize silhouettes of the objects if designed correctly. Often times, we don’t need to show the entire object, instead, featuring the characteristic that best reflects the function behind the icon is more effective.
These outlined icons are usually substituted by filled icons when presented on a smaller dimension. And as users become more and more accustomed to these icons, some universally used icons are further abstracted down to very simple forms (the three bar “hamburger menu” for navigation is a good example) which you can barely tell their origins. I can foresee this trend to be continually carried over to VR/AR experiences where content will be hidden behind interactive buttons with strict space restrictions and triggered on-demand. Through this evolution of iconography design, we can see how trends and standards have shifted along with technology progression but the underlying principles have never changed, good design is “understandable”, “useful”, “aesthetic” and “minimal”.
As I was revisiting Dieter Rams’s 10 commandments, one really stood out to me. It was about being honest. Design should not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept. Working in the field of AI, designers are bearing a bigger responsibility as most of us are constantly told to emphasize the machine learning capability to the users, meanwhile not revealing too much about how exactly it works under the hood. This isn’t a purely ethical question, it is simply a bad experience if users have false expectations or simply left in the dark. Your developers or data scientists might tell you too much transparency is doing no good to the users simply because the technology is too complex and too hard to explain. There is no argument to that, however, simplifying complex systems in a creative way based on a deep understanding of users’ mental model and behavioral habits is the essence of design. I see a tremendous opportunity to create a highly personalised experience with ML and continuously refine it leveraging implicit and explicit user feedback.
In the 20th century, Dieter Rams standardized the interface between physical products and human, 21st century has seen a trend of more standardized human-computer interface, the next 5–10 years, it’s up to all of us to define the best practices for the human-AI interface.
