Look around you and choose an object. Anything in your line of sight. Where did it come from?
I don’t mean “where” in the geographical sense. Chances are you’re looking at a product of mass manufacture shipped from a factory somewhere in Asia. This is a fascinating reminder of how the world is knitted together by globalised commerce, but I want to point out something else that will bend your mind.
You are looking at a product that was designed.
Mind not blown yet? Stay with me.
You are surrounded by design. Virtually everything your body is in contact with right now is the end result of a structured process of product development. There is intentional thought and significance baked into the seemingly unimportant details of the most ordinary things around us.
The colour of that coat hanger? Someone chose that.
The thickness of that piece of paper? Someone calculated what that should be.
The specific radius applied to the corner of your phone? That was designed, then checked, then discussed and checked again and perhaps even prototyped and validated with users for satisfaction before the design was approved and sent off for manufacture.
Whether you recognise it or not, your life has been shaped in minute detail by others. All of the trivial things we never think about – someone else has done the thinking for us.
For the most part this is a wonderful convenience. I for one am glad not to be calibrating the tensile strength of a toilet roll this evening or performing standardised tests to ensure that the dye used in my son’s plush toy dog is sufficiently colour fast to avoid running over our clothes and lounge room when combined with his free-flowing baby dribble.
There is another side to this arrangement, however, and it deserves your consideration. The universal impact of design applies not only to the minutiae of the physical objects that surround us. It shapes the cities in which we live. It shapes the workplace. It circumscribes the markets from which we must secure our food, shelter, and clothing.
Design decisions dictate that most Australian mortgages do not have a fixed interest rate.
Design decisions compel capable young adults to invest countless hours earning a university admissions rank instead of acquiring skills which have actual value in the real economy.
Design decisions are the reason that children spend the vast majority of their childhood with strangers in schoolrooms and not with family exploring the wider world and community around them.
Living in a world that is designed means the most important and personal details of your life have already been shaped by the decisions of others. This means that if you don’t engage your brain when you make decisions about what you buy, where you work, and how you spend your time you will be pushed in a direction that has been chosen for you.
Depending on your demographic you might end up living a fairly comfortable life. But the people who made those world-shaping decisions never met you. They probably got some things right but they certainly got a lot of things wrong.
We live in impersonal societies where many with the greatest power and influence are on an explicit mission to maximise their own wealth and power, whatever the cost to others. Even well-meaning policymakers can get it wrong, simply due to outdated or misguided ideas.
Famed British economist John Maynard Keynes mused about the significant influences in our lives that go largely unrecognised:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
Of course, things could be a lot worse. Modern living standards in many nations are unbelievably good. But if you’re young, living on a low-income, or have a limited education, you are vulnerable to being manipulated and even exploited by the designs of others. How do you guard against that? How do we ensure we get a shot at not merely surviving but thriving?
The answer, again, is design. Or to be more precise; design methodology.
A methodology is a collection of procedures and rules employed in a particular area of study or practise. It’s a toolbox that enables practitioners to produce consistent results. Design methodology provides a set of tools for solving problems and developing products. The whole system of methods when employed correctly is geared towards one thing: meeting human needs.
Design methodology is underpinned by a cascading sequence, starting with an examination of the needs and insights of users and stakeholders. These needs are used to form requirements that will constrain the solution, then an architecture and detailed design are developed to meet the requirements.
In the final stages of the process, verification is conducted to ensure the solution meets each of its requirements. The conclusive step is to place the final product directly in the hands of users for validation; this determines whether or not the needs of the users are actually met. And so the process comes full circle. It starts and ends with identifying and meeting the needs of users.
We are surrounded by systems that have been designed. But virtually no one is conducting the final check of validation. At best society operates through approximation. We are presented with products, services, and institutions that usually work on some level. They produce a result. But do they produce the results we really need? That’s for you and me to determine.
We must take the solutions handed to us and carefully assess whether they are fit for purpose. You can use a dish brush to clean your teeth. You can drink a beer from a shoe. But if these are the solutions that shape your every day you’re unlikely to wake up to find you’re living your best life.
In 1988, engineer and psychologist Donald Norman published his groundbreaking book, The Psychology of Everyday Things. The work spoke to a phenomenon that most people never stop to think about.
We often feel stupid when pushing on a door that opens with a pull, or stumped by how to operate a phone or computer with complex settings. Our experience of these products is both frustrating and dissatisfying. We’re quick to blame ourselves, but it isn’t our fault.
Make no mistake. There’s plenty of malfunctioning stuff in life that is your fault. But we’re also constantly being handed solutions that barely work. They are unreliable, or they lack the basic design details, “affordances” as Norman terms them, which provide an intuitive guide for how to interact with the device. Other products are perfectly functional and even intuitive but in reality, do not meet our most important needs at all.
Everything in life is designed. But it wasn’t necessarily designed for you. Understanding design methodology can put you back in the driver’s seat. If you choose. And that’s the bottom line.
Most people reading this have a lot of options available – more than you realise. It’s normal to feel trapped by the demands of life, but a lot of this restriction is built on assumptions that we’ve inherited about how we have to live.
Fifty years ago, 9-5 work was the unquestioned norm. Until reforms that took place through the 1800s, 16-hour working days were very common. Today, flexible work and work-from-home arrangements are unlocking unprecedented benefits for families and enabling new levels of productivity throughout the economy.
By returning to basics, identifying your fundamental needs and helping to organise the actual requirements and constraints that we’re working within, design methodology blows the possibilities wide open and sets the stage for innovative thinking with the potential to lead to solutions which are not only functional but profoundly fulfilling.
So what’s next? It’s about time you thought carefully about who’s designing your life.
Image by Richard Powers, from The Psychology of Everyday Things.
Interesting read. Reminds me of a post from CityNerd. He's a YouTuber and is part of the FIRE movement. Released an interesting video about learning to live without a car in a car obsessed society - and oh my goodness is that a design choice we suffer from every day!