The Importance of Design Philosophy
Design philosophies are a stated “interest in a set of problems… or foundational concerns” (Wikipedia, 2019). Understanding the philosophies of other projects, designers, or movements, and, perhaps more importantly, having one yourself is critical to consistently achieving the highest quality end product.
Design philosophies aim to guide the decision making process throughout a project, from initial conception to completion, but do so without detailed constraints. By incorporating some flexibility, a philosophy can ensure it applies to every aspect of a designs development process and stay relevant as the solution evolves. This results in a coherent solution, better optimized to achieve the desired effect, be it functional, emotional, semiotic or otherwise.
In contrast, a set of constraints defining every detail of a design solution would quickly become unwealdy. More importantly it is often impossible to set a fully defined constraint untill after the solution has been selected; the design process could be defined as the experimentation to determine the product specification, or the list of constraints that fully define a produt. Using only a product specification to develop designs would result in undefined edge cases that had little to guide them and exceptions being made where rules were nonsensical, or conversely, exceptions not being made, resulting in nonsensical solutions.
The success of a design philosophy can therefore be measured in terms of its ability to consistently result in products that meet its stated intent (the merit of the stated intent is a more subjective, though no less important, question). In this way, philosophies can be treated as hypothesis of what makes a good product that can be empirically tested, thereby providing a feedback mechanism that allows product development techniques to evolve over time. The timeline of a philosophy’s evolution is also important, as a record of the thinking behind products in the past it can inform products in the future; the same mistakes can be avoided or the successes built on.
The advantages of a philosophy stated above could be provided by a holistic set of carefully selected, highly specific constraints derived before the design process began, that had a mechanism for their revision when new edge cases were found. However, commercial design moves fast and not everything can be, or should be, tested so rigorously. The cost and time implications of such an approach could not be justified for decisions that have low risk, defined as severity plus likelihood. One of the beauties of a philosophy is it implicitly provides direction at to what is less important by leaving it out.
The high level nature of a philosophy is able to communicate very rich information, in a more succinct way than a holistic set of detailed constraints could. It is eminently better suited to communicating between teams working on the same design by being more understandable by people, who appear to be universally bad at following rules.
My own design philosophy is something I have written and re-written many times over the years and I am sure I will continue to do so here the future. It helps me consistently create high quality products with optimal performance and build high functioning, efficient teams while allowing for adjustment to different businesses and their objectives, different users, contexts, product types and technologies. Most importantly, it is a basis for critical thinking, providing me with a platform to learn and improve every time I think about a product and how it was, is being, or will be designed.
References
Wikipedia, 2019. Philosophy of design. [Internet] (December 24th 2012). Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_design. [Accessed December 24th 2012].
