A few weeks ago, I posted one of my daily ‘mind burps’ (probably best not to ask if you don’t know) reacting to a sense of design (in this case I’m focussing more on physical product design) becoming somewhat ‘dumbed down’ in the way it is being promoted and skills are shared. Lots of showcasing of superficiality and rather banal products. Clickbait looking for ‘oooh’s’ and ‘aaaah’s’ rather than anything meaty or interesting.
It prompted me to make a statement about design not being the simplistic, superficial and straightforward process it is becoming associated with, but something muckier. I don’t know why I chose the word ‘mucky’ as the connotations are poor, but something about the word resonated with me, and seemed to resonate with quite a few others too.
Here’s why I think it works for me…
1. Decoupling from idealistic process frameworks.
We’ve all seen the diagrams. The most famous of which is the double diamond that purports to simplify design into two neat ‘out and in’ activities. How hard can it be? A bit of research. Explore some ideas. Think big. Now narrow down to the best few. Build them. Test them. Gather feedback. Keep going like a neat little logic diagram until the alchemy has turned your endeavours into gold.
I get it. To try and describe what actually happens in the minds of a designer is futile. Find me one ‘physical product designer’ who can describe what they do in a single sentence without sounding like a poser or a jack of all trades. It’s a mucky process. It can’t really be simplified to a level where you simply follow rules and out pops the answer.
It’s why designers are typically curious and logical and introverted and obsessive and dreamers…all at once. It’s like ordering 4 different ice cream flavours that don’t go together and eating them quickly. A disordered ice cream headache on a different level.
Try describing that. Painful and orgasmic …simultaneously.
But in a valiant attempt to simplify the ‘design’ process into a diagram we’ve created our own nemesis. The very thing that has served to replace us…or diminish our beautiful complexities. We’ve given everyone else a reason to argue that design is simple. Look at the diagram. All we have to do is…
Every industry surrounded in mystique and the dark arts has attempted their own version of the ‘design thinking double diamond’. Negotiation. Entrepreneurialism. Deal making. Fitness. Love. Dieting. But we all know that – despite our futile efforts and hope filled dreams – you can’t simply follow the simple steps and achieve success without a whole heap of effort, pain, diligence, reflection, training and commitment.
Simplicity is an outcome of design for sure, but design ain’t simple. Beautifully mucky maybe?
2. We don’t know what we don’t know.
When you start a design project, whether it be a first glance at a written brief, or a discussion with a new client, you get a hunch. A hunch about whether it can be solved. A hunch about how it might look. A hunch about how you might tackle it. A hunch about how worthy or ‘real’ it is. A hunch about how much it might be ‘worth’ (if you are from the agency world).
But these are all hunches. When I was a young whippersnapper in the early stages of my career, I used to fret about not having all the answers in the meeting. I used to think that clients expected you to just ‘know’…like immediately. That gave me anxiety. Not good. It also stopped me thinking properly. I tried so hard to ‘solve’ before I knew anything, that this initial idea often got in the way of the journey…the process (in whatever form you choose to pursue it). It’s what most undergraduates suffer from.
But I soon learned to trust my ‘gut’ and trust the process.
Trust the ‘gut’ to tell you if it feels like something that can be solved and if the project has legs.
Trust the process to unearth the stuff you need to know to solve the problem.
Just stay curious and open minded and let the sticky stuff stick and let the fluffy stuff float away. You will absolutely meander down dark corridors and blind alleys but give yourself the time and space to understand that these are blind and dark and you can navigate your way around them or out of them. Experience will teach you to know how to do this faster and more efficiently (and more profitably) but there’s never anything wrong with getting a bit lost.
The important thing is to realise that you don’t know anything right now but you will, and when you do, you can make appropriate decisions which will lead to appropriate solutions. But be comfortable in the ‘don’t know zone’. It’s mucky and claggy and a little bit confusing, but follow your instincts and solid reasoning and you will find your way out with a shiny medal and a round of applause…ok that bit isn’t true… but almost!
3. You use whatever you have to hand.
The infernal double diamond often suggests that designers are merely the facilitators of ideas. ‘Research people…deploy’. ‘Post-It notes…deploy”. ‘Getting shit made people…deploy’. ‘Testing people…deploy’. The design thinking team are there to make BIG decisions and point and hand out Sharpies and organise diaries right?
Design is a bit like a really weird, micro-cosmic version of ‘Scrapheap Challenge’. You have a certain amount of time. You have a certain team of people…or maybe just yourself. You have a suite of tools at your disposal (OK…so ‘suite’ sounds a bit grand I’ll admit!). You probably have a fixed budget.
Now make the most of it. Either find people who can help you and have pretty immediate availability or ask people stuff that will help you become knowledgeable really quickly. Then crack on and break it down into manageable chunks that you can tackle with what you have to hand.
That photo you see on design agency websites where there are 8 people all sitting around a wall filled with beautiful renderings and flayed Pantone swatch books and tasty croissants. That’s bollocks. That’s what they want you to think design is all about. Support and laughter-filled collaboration. Not to destroy your dreams…it can be…but it’s about as frequent as finding a parking space near the entrance of the supermarket.
Most of the time you are handed a project brief and given a deadline…be that internal or external…and a budget. Get this done and don’t spend too much. “Sorry we don’t have time for a research phase, the client didn’t have the budget. And I know it says we are putting a ‘team’ on this, but everyone else is busy and the budget really isn’t big enough so do what you can.”
So you get shit done. By whatever means you can.
When you are self-employed (or free from office expectations) you can really play with this freedom and expedience. It’s fun to work out how to learn the most from the least and find a way. If you are in a ‘studio’ you probably only have your computer and Google. Maybe some modelling materials and a band saw but you’ve probably been told to hand the job to a trained modelmaker if you have bigger facilities…and then it gets complicated. Different job codes. So you stick to Google and Pinterest.
But you find a way and it’s usually a bit meandering and mucky. But you do.
4. There’s no real end point.
Ask any designer if they are happy with their old work and most will give a little shudder and mumble some answer about not having had enough budget or the wrong client decisions or not enough time. Few will boastfully say that their past work was still gob-smackingly brilliant. If they do, they are probably no longer doing a decent job and relying on past glories. Just sayin’.
But my point here is that design is hard to end. Most designs are the way they are because that was ‘good enough’ at the point when the budget ran out or the deadline arrived. The story about 5,126 prototypes from James Dyson is fine if you have the lifestyle and family backing to pursue something incessantly without any need to earn money to eat. But most of the rest of us are bound by constraints, be they financial, functional or chronological.
Design is an eternal game of compromises. Nobody ever really gets exactly what they want.
Which also means that no-one ever really gets the chance to refine something until they are truly happy. It remains a little tiny bit mucky.
No-one else will be able to tell, but you can see it. Laughing at you. That radius. That split line. That texture. That battery bulge. That logo placement.
That.
5. Thought processes are not linear.
I’ve talked about meandering a fair bit. I talk about it because it is a good thing. Straight lines are good if you know what you want and you need to get there as quickly and as predictably as possible, but meandering takes you places.
Like country lanes, you only discover new destinations if you drive along roads you’ve never travelled.
Some of what you do as a designer is predictable. The tools you become comfortable using. The way you approach a problem. The way you break things down. Eat. Sleep. Design. Repeat. Right?
But when it comes to exploration, be it ideation, investigation or validation, you need to wander. Both metaphorically and also sometimes physically.
The idea that every design project can somehow follow the same rules kinda baffles me. For sure there is a broad sense that uncertainty leads to less uncertainty (I’m loathe to call it certainty). For all you process diagram nerds out there, there’s one that looks like a chaotic ball of twine leading to a straight line from left to right. Chaos to clarity. That sort of thing. But each and every project takes its own turns based on minute and critical decisions, insights, discoveries and mishaps along the way.
I’m reminded of those Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson books my younger brother loved as a kid. Fighting Fantasy in paperback. Each scenario gives you a series of discoveries and ensuing decisions. You turned to the page that aligned best with your decision and carried the ‘journey’ on from there. Like a massive logic diagram with countless twists and turns that led to different fates and conclusions. That’s what design often feels like.
Every agency and business targeted with design will argue a ‘process’. Usually trademarked (or not as the case may often be!) or faddingly renamed to sound like something new and something that sits about 5 slides into the ‘new biz creds’ deck that gets wheeled out to clients. There will be talk of ‘discovery’, ‘definition’ etc. etc. but if you are permitting design to get its claws into you properly and for the magic to happen, you have to allow those phases and processes to get a bit fudged.
As long as you trust the journey, your gut (some understandably prefer to call it ‘instinct’) and your skills.
But the journey is invariably not linear. Far from it.
Meanderingly explorative. And definitely mucky.
This was never more true than on a huge project I was privileged to work on back in the early/mid 2000’s. I was working for a very notable agency at the time and was part of a team working on one of the most iconic mass market personal care brands of the moment. We had been tasked with designing the next ‘hero’ product. We went through all the phases diligently. Lots of collaboration with the client. Intense research. Creative workshops. Technology scoping. Manufacturing forensics. You name it…we did it.
We presented the final round of initial concepts to the core team and got approval before working them up to present to the biggest of cheeses. The client core team were as nervous about this as we were. This was mega big twitchy bum stuff.
But in the interim, one the designers in the team started scribbling something that we couldn’t ignore. It was just a nice little scribble that we had every right to pass on by. But it niggled and felt wrong to exclude. It had the aura of something lush. All designers will know that feeling…when they sketch something that seems to glow with potential.
So we decided to include it in the big cheese presentation. But we didn’t have time to check with the core team…which was wrong. But we did it anyway. We even left it to the very end of the presentation as a sort of “…and finally” Trevor MacDonald moment. A passing thought if you will.
But it landed. Big time. Like a major earthquake.
And it went on to cruise through consumer testing and every other validation test it was given. And it launched in the market and lasted. And made oodles of money for the client, despite numerous compromises (see point 4).
The core team were furious. For a bit. Rightly so.
Then they also realised that it was futile to fight it. Mucky tends to win.
6. Sometimes you need people. Sometimes you don’t.
Designers are odd folk. We seek validation for our work. We like praise. We are inherently vain creatures (to one level or another). Our brains are a volatile cocktail of rationality and absurdity. We are part dreamer, part technician. Sometimes we need complete solitude to get shit done. And other times we need people around us to bounce stupid ass ideas around until they start to make sense.
‘Normal’ people are bewildered by our ability to draw stuff in front of their eyes. They metaphorically prod us with invisible sticks to see how we react. They jest lovingly about ‘colouring pencils’ but really haven’t a clue how we connect the disconnected dots in our minds and craft beauty and logic from chaos. Like a good bread dough, we are left to ‘prove’ in our own proving drawers and ‘checked on’ every once in while.
There’s no logic or rule book for this stuff. People are starting to get wise to the fact that you can’t simply turn on the ‘creativity tap’. There’s no ‘LinkedIn training certificate’ for ‘batshit imagination’ to add to your resumé…however much I’d love to see that.
Some designers are rigidly process driven. Others are chaotic hurricanes of disorder. Either way, stuff gets resolved and things are realised. Beautiful functional and precisely aesthetic things.
Creativity is hard to define. Creators often can’t quite describe how they think or why they create certain things. People often talk of ‘flow states’ but I guarantee in order to hit flow state, things tend to get a little bumpy beforehand. Mucky even.
7. Cranial pushups.
Much of the design process could be described as somewhat formulaic and process driven. If you look at the double diamond, there are key activities attributed to different parts of the diagram. Research, Ideation, Building, Testing etc.
Some of this could be described as organisational. If you know who you need to talk to then conduct some research and get what you need. Same with building or testing you could argue.
But there are pockets of activity locked away in different part of the process that require proper, bona fide powers of concentration and applied thought. You can’t simply go through the motions and get results. You need to almost ‘clench your brain’ to really wrap your head around a conundrum and wrestle with it until it reveals an answer of some sort…something you can do something useful with.
Bit like a reduction in a saucepan. You can’t rush it. With the correct amount of time and the right conditions you get the required consistency and flavour. But try to speed that up or circumvent things, and you end up with juice rather than jus.
But that bit is bloody hard. Like… proper tricky. Anyone can come up with a number of obvious ideas, but a designer worth their salt will dig deep and find those determined little whelks of ideas stuck firmly to the underside of your brain rocks. They will pick at them and pry them away with persistence until they yield and drop onto the page.
That might just look like someone staring into space for an hour, but that brain is cooking…believe me. Fighting dirty in the cranial cage. Sometimes you need to do it in silence by yourself. Other times you need others to help you find it. But when you do it’s bloody lovely. But never straightforward….and invariably mucky.
If you do it properly you should feel exhausted.
8. Presentation versus process.
For every single design project I’ve worked on, there is always a division of labour between the act of ‘solving’ and the act of ‘presentation’. In other words, there’s a proportion of the agreed time/budget that gets spent on exploring ideas that meet the brief, and the remainder of the time/budget is spent making those ideas look good so that they make sense to the client when you present it to them in a shiny meeting room somewhere.
Now there’s a whole discussion to be had about the sensible split line between these two activities and I have my opinions on this. I think the design industry spend far too long on the ‘shiny presentation’ bit and not enough time on the ‘solving’ bit, and for all the wrong reasons. There seems to be a desire to elevate ideas way past the necessary point of believability or finesse in an attempt to ‘flex’. Hours upon hours spent taking a humble scribble, redrawing it to match the scale and orientation/perspective of all the other ideas, scanning it, doctoring it, colouring it, adding ‘fake sketch lines’ over the top to give the illusion of ‘just drawn’, and then dropping it in a presentation. Or even worse, CAD modelling something that could simply exist as a sketch and then spending hours adding materials, textures and curated lighting to create stupidly realistic visuals (that are then sometimes ‘doctored’ to add fake sketch lines again!) that give an unrealistic expectation of the amount of thought given to them.
In a fair number of the projects I have been involved with, where I haven’t necessarily been able to direct the workflow, the amount of time spent on ‘polishing’ has often been greater than the time spent ‘thinking’…which is bonkers when you think about it. The client has paid you to think and solve…not Photoshop and render.
I completely understand the need to present work in an orderly and understandable way that allows the client to understand the intent and thinking, but the scales need to tip very heavily towards ‘solving’.
But my broader point about this is that prior to the point where the split occurs, there is scrappy chaos. Lots of ideas, scribbles, bits of cardboard cut into odd shapes, random 3D printed tests, samples of materials, pads of paper filled with incoherent notes, computer files with half finished thoughts, scans and traces and browser tabs.
Every designer has their modus operandi but most of the ‘thinky’ bit is somewhat haphazard. Thoughts occur halfway through the process. Opportunities arise just left of centre. You sketch the same shape 50 times because you are convinced there’s something there. You sellotape a battery to a lump of blue foam and start waving it around. That sort of thing. You need to explore and validate quickly for fear of heading down a blind alley. You need to check it’s worth pursuing.
The thinky bit is mucky. Wonderfully mucky.
Like watching someone in a foreign land attempt to order a meal in a restaurant. Indecipherable mutterings and waving arms. Excitable noises. Furrowed brows. Frantic scribbles.
It would be great if clients saw a bit more of that visible chaos, rather than the hyper polished veneer we in the industry seem so fixated on pushing outwards. The shinier and more impressive our visuals, the better we are. Ta Da!
I fear that with the ever faster adaptation of AI tools, that shininess is going to be utterly worthless. Even if you have the talent to create shininess, no one is going to believe you any more.
But as far as I can see, AI can’t really do mucky. Not yet anyway.
I appreciate many of my points tend to overlap a little. But I guess that reinforces the point, that design isn’t always simple to categorise or define. It’s part crazy and part logic. Part meandering and part acceleration. Part obvious and part hidden. A battle of conundrums that we have to deal with on a weekly, daily and hourly basis.
The more we try to simplify it, the more it tries to resist.
I do understand the desire to communicate the power of design – or at least the simplified process of design – to those who don’t get it. I really do. It’s a key part of what most designers have to do to convince someone of their worth. But it’s also the reason I’ve never been one to settle on a ‘standard process’ or framework that gets applied to all projects. I’m a huge advocate of ‘solve the problem in front of you’. If a challenge requires months of research and collaboration and the idea kinda takes care of itself then great. If research is fairly superfluous as much of it is already known and it’s about wide exploratory ideation and some straightforward shortlisting, then that’s also ok.
Like children, you would never expect every child in a family to be the same, despite the same environment, DNA ‘ingredients’, nutrition, schooling and discipline. They vary hugely…to a point where sometimes you wonder if they are actually related!
Each challenge needs a different approach and each journey is entirely different to the last.
Maybe just let it be wonderfully mucky.
