If you poke around industrial and product design, you'll eventually come across Dieter Rams. Rams is a beloved designer known for creating sleek, user-friendly products. Even today, Apple products—from the iPod to the calculator app—reflect designs that Rams created for Braun.
More interesting are his "Ten Principles of Good Design," because I think the violation of one of those principles, specifically, has a huge impact on all of our lives.
Before we jump in, I take "design" as a larger concept than just visual design. As Herbert Simon said, "A Designer is anyone who devises ways to change existing situations into preferred ones."
Good Design Is...Honest?
I design custom software for my team at work that helps marketers edit the company websites when they need to. This software is supposed to make it brainlessly easy to make changes to text, swap out images, create new pages, maintain awards and badges and testimonials and on and on.
While there's lots to improve, I often hear kind feedback like, "It's really intuitive." At first, I couldn't have been more pleased with this praise, but the more I've thought about it, the more empty it feels. What does intuitive even mean in terms of design? It's a great word in a marketing context (although it's over-used, so maybe not so great after all). Like so many other buzzwords, we have to dig deeper to actually figure out what we're talking about.
I have wondered, for example, how anything digital could be intuitive at all? Does a baby know what to do when a keyboard is placed in front of it? Compared to a pencil, all things digital are not remotely intuitive, since a very small child can intuitively create an artistic expression, however encrypted it may appear. The same child cannot possibly execute the simplest action on a computer without being taught both how and why they should perform that action.
Although I know I'm dangerously close to simply playing with semantics, I think my aversion to using the word intuitive to describe a design is actually helpful for me to make better designs. I can make something intuitive to me all day long, but if it really were intuitive then someone else without my expertise should be able to flawlessly execute or act through my design—and I know that is not the case for anything I have ever designed professionally.
Honesty of design becomes an intriguing replacement. Instead of hoping a design can be magically recognized and understood, the design now has something to be evaluated through.
Saying a design is "honest" subtly anthropomorphizes it. Being intuitive is a description of the quality of the design while saying that the design is honest implies that it has the potential to be deceptive—almost having a form of agency. Rather than simply possessing a characteristic, a design takes action.
This also matters to us because it changes the direction of responsibility. If a design is just intuitive, companies can excuse any of its shortcomings, opting instead to blame a person who struggles to use the design as being incompetent. On the other hand, if the design is honest, it puts the responsibility back on the product. It's not about the skill of the user but whether that design is successfully aiding its user. It's a subtle shift going from how do I interact with the product? to how does the product interact with me?
This also helps us evaluate the things that we're using day-to-day in more constructive way. If I need to make a decision that impacts my privacy or my health or my relationships, using this design principle will help me sort through those choices. When I use certain settings or commit some action, do I trust that this company, this product, this app will do what it says it is doing?
Rams' assertion that "good design is honest," is crucial to putting humanity back into the flow of the Corporate world. While companies are ultimately systems seeking profits above all else, the only way to keep it from dipping into deception and exploitation is to remember that there are humans interacting with the system every step of the way.
Good Design Is...Human?
There are certainly pitfalls to anthropomorphism (making something that is not human appear to be human conceptually, behaviorally, etc.) as we've explored in previous newsletters. We can make mistakes in our understanding of other living creatures, for example, when we project our human-centered experience onto them. This can even happen human to human: how many times have we assumed that a person took a particular stance or held a preference that we, ourselves, had, only to discover those assumptions were wrong?
Knowing that, I still think that the assignment of the value of honesty to design is a wise choice. Honesty is a reliable value for us as social creatures—it's one value we can probably all get behind. It also raises the expectation of quality from both the producer and the person using the product.
It is more critical now to take on that responsibility of honest design as a creator, because our world is so easily filled with dishonest or less-honest design. Everything from processes making it hard to cancel a subscription to products that simply don't do what was promised or expected.
I think that design is the way that we can package up human-centered values at work. We may not have a lot of control over the largest systems in our lives, like our government, our social systems and culture, but in my experience, we can have a lot of impact through our work.
For the last four years, I've made a raucous about accessibility, which is a term I use to group any design or development choice to make our websites more easily usable by people of any ability (including those with no or low vision, cognitive impairments, those with fine motor impairments, etc.). Not only has this helped us serve more people, I think it has also impacted our Marketing team culture—it has been a way to encourage people to consider the implications of the choices they make.
In a world where profit often competes with humanity, honest design could serve as a safeguard against (some) exploitation. It's idealistic, but what else do we have?