Communication in design

The process of design and how the viewer understands the information that is presented has always intrigued me because as designers, we have a responsibility to win the viewer somehow and not all design has its desired effect. Not all of it really works. Much of it is redundant, and that's sad. I'm always looking at the junk mail that comes through my door. So much of it goes unread. What a waste.

Stephen Heller writes in The Education of a Graphic Designer that design should be about meaning and how meaning can be created. Working in the field of design for 13 years, there are so many out there in the field who just want the job done and don't really care about the process of research and experimentation to find the best possible solution. It takes too much time. This is understandable given the current speed at which life happens but at the same time, it's not understandable. If we could just take the time to think about what we are doing and how we are communicating, maybe our design might take longer to produce but it might have twice the impact.

Richard Buchanan, chair of the department of design at Carnegie Mellon University says that through designed objects, "designers have directly influenced the actions of individuals and communities, changed attitudes and values, and shaped society in surprisingly fundamental ways." What a responsibility we have to communicate.

It's amazing how many perspectives need to be considered in design; grammatical, semiotic, theatrical, anthropological, physiological, philosophical, political and social. This is clearly not just putting images and text on a page and making it look nice.

In J. Christopher Jones Hierarchy of Design Problems below, we can see that it's not simply about thinking about the component or the product, we have to think about how that product is going to affect related systems and even the community around it.