Michael Fischer

Canterbury

Anthropologist

I agree that much of what counts as 'design' is trivial, and often consists of adding dye to the plastic or making something so small that you lose it. But I would argue this is simply bad design. Good design saves time, money and effort.

Business folk like to imagine themselves as being 'hard headed and practical' but what this often translates into is acceptance of inferior products that underperform and waste time over new generations of apparently simpler technology that does just as much with much less time and effort.

Early adopters aside, what most people (including some 'designers') fail to realise is that design, successful design that is, is all about function. Indeed design is the technology that enables other technology to be useful. Good design incorporates the contextual knowledge that is necessary to make best use of 'features' and capabilities without having to learn this contextual knowledge as earlier users did. This is a fundamental part of being more attractive - pretty is as pretty does.

This, of course, leads to disjunction between generations of users. People who adopted the earlier, hard to use, versions of technologies that lacked benefit of good design (and how!) become clumsy when confronted with product with incorporated design. They are so used to drawing on deep knowledge to do the simplest things, that they stand as if naked wondering "how do I do X?" (where X may be 'turn it on').

An excellent example of this occured in my life in the past Christmas, when my 2.5 year old grandson had to instruct my wife, a long time early adopter, in how to use an iPod. It was just too simple for her. She was looking for the trees and they were not there to get lost in.

The iPod was selected out as an example of flashy design over function. But if you look at Apple's approach to design over the past 8 years, it has moved towards being as plain and simple as possible mechanically while accomplishing a range of tasks that most people use in an effortless manner.

The 'features' are incorporated into the basic design. They just happen. Others, such as Ericsson and Sony have done this with phones. There is no doubt that over my four generations of Ericsson/Sony phones that they have become better, more powerful, simpler and smaller, as well as 'prettier'. Perhaps this is the transition from the 'dumb blond' to the smart yellow haired woman.