Survival Design

initial post

From: Jeremy Avnet
To:   Self-Referential Orgy <sro@lists.theory.org>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 01:59:54 -0800

How to See, George Nelson, p. 108 (edited):

Design is a process: one starts with a need, a problem, and ends up with a design for a thing. The basic rules are not complicated: a designed object has to do what it was made for. If we look at a flower carefully and study its details, we come to realize that it looks exactly like what it does.

There is no better description of a successful man-made design. A pen looks as if it can write, a kite looks as if it can fly. A thing that does not look like what it does, such as a color television set in a cabinet that tries to look like a relic from a château on the Loire, is a bad joke and it merely reveals the illiteracy of the owner and the cupidity of the manufacturer.

To make a very, very good design, not merely an adequate one, is an exceedingly difficult job, and the job gets harder as the result moves toward perfection.

The best designs we know about (outside of nature, where all organisms fit into this category) are survival designs. A plane is a survival design: it either flies properly or it will presently kill its crew and passengers. Space and deep-sea equipment are survival designs, and so is most militry hardware. Survival designs are the best for the simple reason that the user's life is riding on their performance.

My guess is survival design is successful precisely because it exposes the necessary elements and nothing more. Living organisms seem like fantastic examples of this because they can harbor beauty as a face for pure functionality. Form and function, i suppose.

Been thinking a lot about design with regards to Mosuki. Trying to understand what the core intention of the site is and how to express it via the interface.

I figure some of you will scoff at this passage, so break it down. :)

response

From: Aaron Clauset                        
To:   Self-Referential Orgy <sro@lists.theory.org>
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:26:57 -0700                                                                

I guess I'm the first to scoff :)

I think the idea of a good design looking like what it does is preposterous. This is best illustrated by considering the connection between function and appearance - how does a person understand intuitively what function something fills to begin with (e.g., that a pen writes)? It is simply the cultural and experiential history of similar forms being associated with the particular function. When tv sets first came out, people understood them as being like little theatres, thus that's what they looked like. But as the cultural understanding of the utility of tv sets evolved, so did the design. Thus, we now have almost purely functional appearance of sets in that they have virtually no adornments aside from their viewing area. (Indeed, once could probably argue that industrial design best reflects now what something does, but what its designers *think* it does.)

I think good design is a careful balance of several factors: aesthetic appeal (something can be beautiful yet completely useless), intuitive appeal (it can't be too outrageously different from the set of form/function associations the target audience currently possess), accessibility (the functionality must be accessible and the paths to features must be shallow and make sense), and finally the utility itself (it should do useful things).

As a case in point, consider what a 19th century intellectual would do when confronted with a laptop - even if she were incredibly intelligent, because she hasn't learned the same functional/form associations that we have (mouse interface, menu bars, windows, etc.), she would have no clue how to operate it, although she could learn through tedious trial-and-error (which is something you don't want your users to have to do much of). So, perhaps really good design is nothing more than finding the sweet spot which balances the four characteristics I mentioned, and perhaps even pushes the envelope on what kind of form/function associations people have. You can probably take this kind of argument and use it to rationalize why Apple continues to design such great products (some parts of OS X excluded).