How can we expect people to care about design when they don't even see it?
Occasionally I get woken up in the early hours of the morning by something going on outside. Either our roofer neighbour loading up his truck with ladders, or the nightshift neighbour coming home from work, or a summer thunderstorm. Whatever it is, like many of you I'm sure once you're awake, your brain spins up quickly.
Lying there in the dark a few days ago, I was reflecting on an interaction that I'd had with a small network group at a medtech get-together some six months earlier. The train of thought is circuitous and irrelevant to this topic, but it lead to me thinking about how much of our time is spent worrying about ourselves. Our own needs, our own problems, our own wants. It's why we love talking about ourselves.
It's no small irony that we worry about what others think of us, and yet those same people aren't worrying about you. They're too preoccupied worrying about what you think of them.
Nobody really cares what shirt you picked today.
The unfortunate reality is that most people care as little about your design as they do about what shirt you wore.
In my long-standing conversation on Industrial Design's value problem, I often raise the issue around communicating the value that design brings to a project. While I think part of the solution to this problem might be how to better communicate that value, the other angle may be something entirely different.
Nobody Cares About Design
Have a look at the website for almost every design consultancy. They all follow the same theme. We can do this, we did that, we are this kind of people. It's an inward focus. I believe by focusing too much on ourselves as design service providers, and not enough on the problems of potential customers we're trying to reach, we're actually leaving money on the table. Potential clients don't really care about design that solves other people's problems. They only care about their own.
This may be in part why Industrial Design, especially in Australia, is so competitive. It's treated as a zero-sum game because the potential client pool only consists of people who already know what they're looking for. They must already know what Industrial Design is, and also know what they're looking at when they visit your website. That's a frighteningly small percentage of the population. Most people don't even know what Industrial Design is.
As designers we pour over our designs and the designs of others. We overanalyse and overthink to make sure we're creating the best design we can within our constraints. No detail is (or should be) overlooked. Unfortunately, we often forget that not everyone cares about or is even aware of these details.
Design Is 99% Invisible
Most people don't see the work and thought that goes into creating a design. Even great design belies the time and effort that has gone into its creation. Sure, we can appreciate a good product, and I'm sure many non-designers also appreciate a good product when they see one. So the saying goes, "Design is 99% Invisible".
As designers we take pride in the statement. Good design fades into the background and seamlessly and effortlessly gets the job done. But it's a double-edged sword. It equally means that design is only 1% visible. If it's out of sight, it's also out of mind. How can we expect people to value 100% of the design effort, when they only see 1% of it?
This isn't the case in many other fields. My usual example is medical device regulatory affairs. You don't have to spend long looking into it to become confused and overwhelmed. A casual glance is enough to frighten most people off. If you don't believe me, feel free to read ISO 13485 and come back to me with the ELI5 version. As a result, people needing regulatory affairs work done are compelled to pay the regulatory magicians handsomely for their magic.
Conversely, when you look at most well designed products, it's obvious why it is the way it is. Yet the truth is that the end product never materialises fully formed from the designer's head because it's obvious. It becomes obvious through an iterative design process that teases out the problem and works through the solution. This is the invisible part, there's no way the end user could know these things. Opposite to my regulatory example, it looks simple on the surface so to the casual observer it must be simple. If it's simple, then it's not clear why one should pay good money for it.
Because of this attitude, most non-designers don't consider design to have the impact on our lives that it actually does. Adobe got into hot water recently for using "dark patterns" in their website design to subvert subscription cancellations. While design being used for evil as well as good is a different topic entirely, most people didn't even realise it was the design screwing with them. This is something I want to dive deeper into another time, but I believe the simplistic view of design by the general populace is a big contributor to design being chronically undervalued.
What Really Drives The Purchasing Decision
If nobody cares about design, then why do people buy stuff? Again, they care about themselves. Their own needs, own wants, and own problems. People buy a laptop because they have a problem that a laptop solves. People buy a broom, or a car, or a smart coffee mug because they have problems those things solve (the problem doesn't always have to be real or practical).
Oftentimes buyers might not even be aware of the real problem they're buying a particular product for. A teenager might buy an iPhone because all their friends have iPhones. A sales exec might buy a Mercedes Benz so they can look successful to their neighbours. A cat owner might buy a particular scratching post because the company donates to the RSPCA. In all of these cases does the design of the product actually have anything to do with the purchasing decision?
Or to put it another way. Nobody cares that you removed a part line by performing some DFM gymnastics. Nobody cares that your product is slightly more comfortable because you worked really hard on the ergonomics. What they do care about is if the product, as a whole, fixes their problem. They don't care how the product solves their problem. They care if the product solves their problem. Often, they don't even care if it solves it well. People seem to be perfectly happy buying mid or trash products from Amazon or Temu or Aliexpress (all three basically being the same thing).
Design, The Product
As designers we try so hard to communicate what design does and why it has value. But we try to do this by talking about ourselves and our designs. We might be going about it all wrong.
One approach to solving the value problem might be to set aside what design does, and instead repackage design as the product itself that solves each client's problem in a clear and obvious way. The irony is that we do this with the products we design all the time. It just needs to be turned outward to design itself. To do this we need to speak to the clients needs and wants, real or perceived, and sell design as a product that solves that problem. The value can be furtively sideloaded later.
You may recognise this as a marketing exercise, and you'd be right. Clients sign up the big-name agencies not because their work is the best, but because they can associate with the big name. That might look better on an earnings call, or to the product manager, or funding bodies, or whatever. It might have nothing to do with the design at all.
Now there's a meta thought; a product designer turning design into a product.
