Ghosts in the Machine: Why It's Hard to Write about Design

No one would claim that design is a science, not even an applied science. If we consider design as a set of processes by which the products of an advanced consumer society are given their varied forms and functions (only one of many possible definitions), then design is a messy business. Mixed motives complicate the work of a product designer. Packaging old or new technologies in forms that attract and satisfy consumers, that are easy to use under a variety of conditions and expectations, that are relatively inexpensive to manufacture and distribute, and that compare favorably with competing products requires a hybrid process involving engineering, materials science, ergonomics, art, psychology, and marketing. Design occurs at the intersection of technology and culture, where the presumed certainties of engineering meet a confusion of human needs and desires.

Perhaps because the site of design is forever shifting in response to more general historical change, no interpretation of design has long remained current. Since Christopher Dresser's treatise The Art of Decorative Design (1862), which defined its subject as beauty "added" to utility, dozens of books have attempted to explain the design process to practitioners, potential clients, and the general public. Apparently assuming that no prior interpreter has come close to getting it right, each author starts over by offering a basic set of defining principles. It is not surprising, given design's messy reality, that most interpretations fall short in one way or another. That is indeed the case with two otherwise engaging new contributions to this genre, Donald A. Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things and Henry Petroski's Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design, both of which set out to clarify the requirements of effective product design. A third recent work, John H. Lienhard's Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins, frequently portrays design as a fundamental link between technology and culture.¹

An opening anecdote in Petroski's Small Things Considered illustrates the hybrid nature of this subject. An engineer, a psychologist, and an architect are discussing product design on a radio talk show. The architect (Michael Graves) observes that people enjoy the whimsical form of a teakettle he has designed. The engineer (Petroski) laments an attractive but functionally deficient teakettle whose spout tends to drip. The psychologist (Donald A. Norman) maintains that above all a product should communicate effectively through its user interface—but he admits to displaying the architect's teakettle in his kitchen window. Oddly enough, Norman begins Emotional Design by describing not one but three teakettles displayed in his kitchen window. Although he observes that Graves's kettle "actually works rather well," he rarely uses any of them but instead values them for their attractive qualities as "sculptural artwork" (p. 4). For Norman, a cognitive psychologist who has worked in the personal computer industry as an expert on user interface, to proclaim the importance of emotion in design represents a complete about-face. Although he admits he "didn't take emotions into account" when he wrote The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988), he now believes "the emotional side of design may be more critical to a product's success than its practical elements" (p. 5). His reinterpretation of product design would be more compelling if not for his insistence that appealing to emotions is an unprecedented new development. Although cognitive psychologists may only recently have discovered "how important emotion is to everyday life" (p. 8), such figures as Raymond Loewy and Harley Earl, the most famous American product designers of the mid-twentieth century, based their entire careers on appealing to irrational desires.

Promoting what amounts to a biological theory of design, Norman maintains that emotion and cognition work in tandem as consumers relate to products and, more generally, as people relate to the material world around them. According to Norman, this process involves three levels of mental activity, each deriving from a different phase of evolution. The most basic is the "visceral" level, which is hard-wired in the brain to regulate instinctual reactions...