How do the tools we use change our designs as they exit our heads?

Photo by Milad Fakurian

I've touched on it once or twice before, but there is a difference between design as an idea and design as an execution of that idea. The sketches you produce and models you render are not the idea. They are the embodiment of that idea. Without them the idea, as good as it may be, remains eternally locked in your head.

Unfortunately as designers we cannot be paid simply to come up with ideas that remain in our heads. We're paid to have good ideas that can be brought into the world as things that serve a purpose. Nobody can do that for us, we must extract the idea and communicate it to others.

It is even true that we must communicate our own ideas back to ourselves in order to develop the idea into something meaningful. By scribbling out the idea onto the back of an envelope we're taking an idea and trying to add real shape to it. What we sketch out, and how we reinterpret what we sketch, gets reinserted as new inputs into the idea in our brain.

Further, some ideas are just so complex that it is not possible to hold it in our minds eye all at once. We must compartmentalise some of it (on paper) and consider chunks of it one piece at a time.

Sadly, many great ideas die because they're poorly communicated. Yet a more disaparing tale is that many bad ideas are successful because they're communicated so spectacularly (often literally).

An Inextricable Influence

How we communicate a design, from that first scribble through to a product specification, becomes an inherent part of the design itself. The two are inextricable; without being communicated the idea cannot exist in our shared reality.

Thus, we use tools appropriate for what we wish to communicate. All things we employ as designers are effectively tools for communication:

• A pencil sketch can communicate the [literal and figurative] outline of a design.
• A concept sketch can communicate the rough shape, colours, or operations of a design.
• A CAD model can communicate the exact size and shape of the design.
• A rendering can communicate the colours, materials and finishes of a design.
• A Proof Of Concept prototype can communicate the mechanism of action of the design.

And so on.

Choosing the right tool for the right job is part of the art of learning to communicate your design. A rendering wouldn't get you very far with the toolmakers. Likewise, it would be a tough sell to investors if you're asking them to imagine what your device looks like from your envelope sketches.

While we accept that how we communicate our design influences how others perceive it, what we perhaps don't accept is how the tools we use to communicate the design also influences the design itself.

Lost In Translation

As you'll be aware if you read last week's post, I've been wading knee-deep in the special kind of hell that is Grasshopper tutorials. That's continued this week, mostly because I like to suffer for my art. That said, there's no better way to learn a new bit of software than trying to deliver a new project using it. After two weeks I can confidently say I sit firmly in the Valley of Despair on the Dunning-Kruger scale.

Last week I also described Rhino as a kind of Solidworks/Illustrator hybrid. Much more free-form than Solidworks, and yet with some grounding in scale that can be translated to the real world. Using Rhino and Solidworks interchangeably throughout the week has given me opportunity to reflect on what's good and bad about both tools, and why you might use one or the other.

There's no question that there is some level of snobbery amongst designers based on what tools we choose to use. Rhino might be considered the poor cousin of Solidworks, which in turn might be considered the poor cousin to Catia. As in all things, this kind of "pick a side and be a dick about it" mentality usually comes from a place of ignorance.

There's no 'best' tool. There is only the right tool for the right job in the right circumstances.

More importantly, for me it has raised the question: What and how much of our design gets lost in translation when we use these tools? Regardless of which one that may be.

A Failure To Communicate

I want to know what we unconsciously design out of our designs because we can't draw it, can't model it, or can't prototype it. Not that it can't be done, but we don't know how to do it using the tools we use. Or simply can't be done with the tools we choose.

What poor cousin of our design are we settling for because we can't precisely recreate the idea in our head?

I would not expect these things to be large system-level things. I would imagine them to be small things. Subtleties in shape, or surface details. Small things that take a design from a 7 to an 8 or 9.

Some time ago I wrote about using AI in creative professions and the concept of a reverse-centaur. Where a 'centaur' is a human head controlling an AI workhorse, a 'reverse-centaur' is where the AI head controls a human workhorse. This is seen across many industries, but in the context of creativity I questioned how much control as a designer are we giving up to these tools.

While the AI bubble grows very thin indeed, I think the more real question we should ask as designers is what compromises are we making to our designs because of the tools we use today. Or what skills do we lack with those tools that prevents us from accurately communicating our design.

While the value isn't in being able to use these tools in themselves, the real value is realised through the deft use of the right tool at the right time. The two are inextricable.

An elegant idea must also be communicated elegantly.