What is design in the eyes of real people?
I think this falls into two areas, firstly design for design sake – we know that a Dyson vacuum doesn’t need to be funky colours so we understand that this is design for design sake and secretly we all know that costs time and money so we are prepared to pay for that. The same way we buy posh espresso coffee machines for home and then never use them. It’s appealing to be different (or is it more the same?) so that why we do that and maybe also explains how a lot of aspirational marketing is done – make the product or service something to aspire to and then you are creating demand; messy and unruly but it works in today’s “social climbing” society. The second kind of design is BAD design and this hacks people off, waaay more than aspirational, plastic moral based stuff. Bad design turns people off, good design of this sort goes unnoticed unless you have an interest in it or have a eureka moment.
At a recent meeting filled with execs I asked them to give me a very recent example of good design and I got some very interesting answers. The best answer came from a CEO who listed the “1 hr to the front of the queue” markers that they have at Disney World as the best piece of design he had seen. To many traditional marketers this is not design, the reality of it is that people see the world like this – ignoring the exceptional design work of, say, Scaglietti designing Ferrari cars which almost transcends design into beauty. The most far reaching examples of good design are almost all simple and focussed on the needs to the beholder. And now to corrupt one of my favourite quotes: Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
