Design: Another Reconsideration - Ivan Chermayeff, 1969

When, as a young college design student, I discovered the existence of Ivan Chermayeff I felt I had found the one professional graphic designer that really understood the purpose and role of his vocation. His approach resonated with me as being honest, open and direct - and as such was a refreshing change from what can seem to be a rat race of mimicking styles and trends at speed without pause for genuineness or genius. Chermayeff's own philosophy has had a massive impact on my own thinking about my role as a designer, and the ideals I hold about how I should apply my craft.

Years later, when studying at University I came across an article originally written by Chermayeff in 1969 (and if memory serves correctly re-published in Idea: Special Issue: Chermayeff & Geismar, 1981) entitled "Design: Another Reconsideration". I drank in every word, photocopied it, and used it to fuel part of my dissertation. Since then I have often wanted to read it again, but never found it re-printed or archived anywhere on the Internet.

Yesterday, when visiting my parents, I took a look in their attic and found some of my old college work. Stuffed into one of my essays I was suprised and pleased to find the photocopy I must have made over 10 years ago.

I wouldn't know how to get hold of it now, so I have attempted to transcribe the article from my photocopy.  If Ivan Chermayeff or IP owners of Idea magazine object, I will gladly take this down.

But in my opinion, this is too good to miss.

Design: Another Reconsideration

Every few years, or is it months – on some days it seems like minutes – I ask myself, as I'm quite sure most other designers do, what is it I do every day. What is design anyway? And whatever it is, do I personally really want to do any more of it? Is it of any importance? To society? To communications? Even to clients?
It is easier to begin answering these questions by sneaking up on them; by deciding what design is not.
Design is not what a considerable number of self-described designers think it is.
Design is not art.
Design is not terribly significant.
Design is not always better than nothing.
Design is the solution to problems, real, important or unimportant. The problems of design are not designer problems, they are client problems. Design must therefore grow out of a reasonable understanding of these problems, and their goals and aspirations.
If design solutions do not come directly out of the problems they face, then they will not be design solutions, but be arbitrary, and will probably lean heavily on current fads of typographic or illustrational style. Such designs will also be no good, or to put it another way, will not be design. Truman Capote when asked what he thought of the writing in some best seller, a few years back, replied, “That's not writing, that's typing.” The same thing applies to design. If it's not an answer to a problem, it's not design, it's layout.
I suppose I should backtrack and make clear that “design” refers to Graphic Design or other predominantly visually oriented areas of activity. It include the shell of the typewriter but not the guts.
Because design is concerned with symbols rather than structures, looks of machines rather than their works, typefaces rather than words, a concerned designer can get frustrated.
In order to design a good symbol the designer must understand what it will represent and the more he investigates, presuming a highly cynical, objective, and unbiased questioning attitude, the more likely the designer will want to influence the structure, to change it for the better, or quit.
Every problem of every client is different, and every client is different. (You can argue that they are all the same, but that would be a confession the design is a waste of time and money.) Under these circumstances the only way to keep up or reach a high level of design (in no way synonymous with successful) is to maintain a continuous and unrelenting interest in what the problem at hand really is. It is an old adage that once a problem is truly described, the solution comes along with the description.
Herein lies one fundamental problem with design as a viable activity.
Simply put:
Design problems are more interesting than design solutions.
It seems more challenging to design a new concept, than to design an ad about it. Talking about problems, visually or in print, is not as rewarding or interesting as dealing with them intimately.
All this, of course, is only true if the problems are interesting. Not all problems are either interesting, valid or worth working on or thinking about for a second, unless it's a matter of survival.
I feel it is extremely important for designers to be more interested in areas outside their own. Design is a service operation. Thinking about and developing solutions to other people's problems.
Designers usually don't write very well.
Designers don't usually even communicate very well, even thought communication, or one form of it, is their life's work.
Designers should read.
Designers should make themselves aware of everything.
Designers must be selective.
Designers must think.

Ivan Chermayeff
New York, May 1969

(Source believed to be: Chermayeff, I. (1981). Design: Another Reconsideration. Idea Special Issue: Chermayeff & Geismar. Unknown (1), Unknown.)

Game Engines go Free

If you have been tempted to cross the boundary between 2D interactive media or games or 3D animation into 3D games, you will probably know you need to get a decent 3D game physics engine.

That's where my brain has been lately, and consequently I have turned my attention to physics engines. In my mind it was initially a toss-up between Epic's UnrealEd, which comes with Unreal Tournament, or the FPS Creator from The Game Makers.

UnrealEd would have been first choice since I know it is used by a local university on their Game Art degree, on the other hand the FPSC had good features too, and in some ways was less complex and perhaps more suitable for allowing (high school level) students to quickly preview their characters and in-game objects.

However as I did some digging I found that the current plethora of game engines out there, including some open source offerings, has made the area highly competitive. So competitive in fact that well respected commercial engines are now becoming available FREE for personal use, or under developer licenses where you only pay if you make money. This combined with all the free stuff, makes for quite a choice.

Commercial Game Engines for Free

UDK - Unreal have released what they call the Unreal Development Kit, it contains all the tools previously only available to commercial developers or those with a lot of spare cash. This now seems to replace UnrealEd from my point of view.

FPSC - The Game Makers have released a free developers edition of FPSC. It has all the features of the pay for version minus network games and compile - but the pay for is only £30 these days anyway.

Unity - Described as being the best game engine this side of a $million, it normally retailed at about $200, but a free development version is now available too, and looks pretty amazing.

Freeware or Open Source Game Engines

Blender - Has long been capable of producing 3D games made interactive with Python scripting.

Platinum Arts Sandbox 3D Game Maker - purports to be popular with educational environments.

Cheap Game Engines

The 3D Game Maker - I thought I would throw this one in. Although very limited in terms of customisation, for some educational purposes (e.g. Level 1 and 2) this could be ideal. With a bit of technical know how students can include their own 3D models (.x format) in their games.


Well, I already owned FPSC, the 3D Game Maker, and UnrealED, but now I have downloaded Unity and the UDK (be interested to see how UDK is different from UnrealEd). I can hardly wait to get started.

Design Out Crime

I received an email today from the Design Council and was immediately interested in an article about using design to cut crime. For me this is exactly what design is about, that is solving real world problems. As Ivan Chermayeff would encourage me to think - these solutions should come out of an understanding of the problem.

So what was the article about? Beer glasses, that don't break, or if they do, cause less damage to people - we are talking about cutting down incidence and opportunity for 'glassing' attacks.

That means designing something that has some aesthetic value, a practical use, and limited abuse.

Read the full article here:

http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Design-Council/Files/Landing-pages/Design-Out-Crime/Alcohol-related-crime/?id=5335&WT.dcsvid=NDA5OTYwNDIwOAS2&WT.mc_id=

And you can watch a video about it below:

Designing the next generation British pint glass - the design story from Design Council on Vimeo.

Design industry calls for "More Rounded" design graduates

This is always one issue that concerns me about my students. You get the creative ones who hate computers, then you get the computer geeks who think knowing the software will somehow make up for their lack of creativity.

They are both wrong. Where interactive media is concerned anyway.

Design Week reports that the D&AD Xchange conference for tutors once again highlighted the "mismatch between the kind of graduates design colleges are providing and what consultancy creative heads require".

And what do design consultancies require in new graduates? In their own words "More rounded" graduates. By this they mean more creatively rounded - more understanding of creativity, more understanding of design. Rather than a 2 or 3 year higher education in design some have even suggested a 3 year foundation course in design (allowing design students to experience a wide variety of creative disciplines while developing their creativity) followed by only one year of specialisation.

For some of my students that would mean not getting into the web design and interactive media technology for another 3 years - and meanwhile, they learn to be creative designers in many different media.

Oddly perhaps for art & design (though not so odd perhaps for a wanabee web designer) many of my students seem to resist the creative development required to be an effective designer. Many are focused so much on learning the technology, they are in danger of being technically good, but creatively stunted - able to use technology, but not to solve design problems.

As Neville Brody puts it: "We imagine to be able to do anything, and our software helps us believe we can... But we must move beyond the 'how' to reconsider the 'what' and the 'why'."

This is my greatest fear for some of my design students. They are most interested in learning how to do something, but ignore the important business of learning how to decide what they should produce and why.

Those who persist in making this mistake may well regret it. Leaders from the industry have spoken, they want creative people, not just technitians.

If they resist the creative development aspect of their education, they may get what they want in the short term, but in the process fail to become what their employer wants.

Recognising the value of design...

Chuck Green is one of those names (a bit like Chris Pirillo) that has been around, sharing their wisdom, since before the dot com bubble burst - I first came across Chuck Green in 1999 and even then he managed to make plain old HTML look pretty good.

Anyway, I have been recieving Chuck's emails for a while, but today's was so especially interesting that I have decided to share a chunk with you:

To those who don't recognize the value of graphic design... »

I got a plea for help the other day. A designer who frequents this blog had shared a recent post with an engineer friend and the reply was a bit condescending. The post, "The talent that makes a good designer great," points to an engineer who I thought was particularly innovative. My purpose in drawing attention to him was to emphasize the importance of the same type of innovative thinking to the field of graphic design.

The essence of the engineer's response was they saw little correlation between the skills of an engineer and those of a graphic designer. How could that type of innovation, they posed, have anything to do with a designer's sense of style, their ability to choose typefaces, their knowledge of color, and so on. After all, the subject of my post, the engineer asserted, was a PhD candidate.

I laughed out loud. Every designer has had (or will have) this conversation. At its root is the implication that devoting one's career to the design of communications and an interest in the aesthetic is somehow less of a calling than some other, more significant field of endeavor.

My response is this:

The ergonomics and aesthetics of design are to engineering what taste is to food.

Remove the aesthetic qualities (style, organization, presentation) of the clothing you wear, the book you are reading, the automobile you drive, the room in which you spend your time, and so on, and all you have left is...function.

It is important for every student of design (and engineering) to recognize and appreciate the importance of form to function and vice versa. And it is equally important to understand that to be a exceptional practitioner of either discipline requires out-of-the-ordinary instincts, curiosity, knowledge, craft, and so on.

Lots of people view art and science as a comfortable coexistence. But for those who are particularly attuned to one or the other, it is good to remember that the most debilitating form of blindness is to minimize the way in which others see. It is not only a sure way to limit your potential--it is a certain and swift strategy for diminishing your influence.

An example of substance without style... http://www.ideabook.com/substance_without_style.html

Reminds me of a conversation I had with an engineer on this very blog. Thankfully my engineer friend is open minded to the value of aesthetics, just as I see function as being fundamental too.

Where Interactive Media Can Go

Those of you who are old enough may remember back in 1993 a revolutionary new computer game was released - MYST. Back then it used the Mac's hypercard system (you know, the one that might have been a forerunner to the internet if only anyone had realised the potential of linking between stacks on other machines), simple yet effective.

As far as today's interactive media is concerned, the original MYST was pretty low tech. When I consider the simplicity of the original MYST back end it becomes clear that pretty much anyone with an intermediate knowledge of Flash and Actionscript could produce a comparable game today.

What set MYST apart then wasn't the technology, but the creativity with which the technology was used.

And this is what I keep trying to get my students to understand. It isn't all about being able to use the software, loads of people can do that. It is about the thinking, the ideas and the creativity.

That is why we emphasise the design process over the final outcome.

Of course later versions of MYST are a lot more complex than the original in 1993, but the ideas, the thinking and the creativity is still what drives the process, even if the technology has changed.

As demonstrated in this making of video...



The Making Of Myst Iii Exile via Noolmusic.com

More Coding for Fun (while still solving the design problem)

Well, as usual I take the opportunity in the holidays to practice and develop my Interactive Media skills. Last time I made a Ukulele Tuner, this time, prompted by a relatives' purchase of a OO gauge railway for Christmas (and my own love of making things and building models) I put together a program to speed up scale calculations to make it easier for me when (and if) I find time to make scale model buildings for my relatives' railway.

Here it is produced in Flash with ActionScript, graphics produced in Fireworks and exported as PNG 32. Ultimately I will compile it into a windows executable using Zinc or Flash Studio once it has been thoroughly tested:




The model railway community on the Model Rail Forum, the New Railway Modellers forum and the Model Railway Forum were very helpful. Although I like to make models when I have time, I am by no means an OO or even a model railway expert at this point in time, so input from the potential user base was absolutely vital.

I guess the lesson I would want my students to take from this is that you don't have to be an expert in a field to successfully design for it. But you do have to do thorough research and be genuinely interested in learning about the field and learning about what is important to your client/the user. If you haven't learned to be interested you may find that what you produce meets the needs of precisely no-one - and you won't even get paid.

This lesson was summed up nicely by a designer who has influenced my approach to creative practice, Ivan Chermayeff. In a long time ago interview with ID magazine (I think it was ID), in an article called "Design: Another Reconsideration", Ivan simply states that "designers should be interested in everything" (para).

I think he is right. Almost the one industry a designer will not design for is his or her own industry. They will be employed to design for a variety of other industries throughout their career however, so an interest in other people's area of expertise is vital. After all, design is about problem solving (another lesson from Chermayeff), so designers need to be interested in the problems and get inside them, because as Ivan once described - solutions come directly out of an understanding of the problems (para).

That's why my research took me directly to the community of model railway enthusiasts. Because in talking to them (here, here and here) I would come to correctly understand the problem (the issues surrounding calculating scale conversions for model railways, the scales themselves, what the user needs it to do etc.) Once I understood the problem, the solution was pretty much obvious, all I had to do was apply my new understanding to the interface, visual appearance and make it work.

And the result? The community feedback was positive about the current version, so I know I have been successful. While a few suggestions for even further development have since been made, for now I have a working product that actually meets my own needs, and the needs of real live users.

Only possible, because the users were consulted about the design problem, and their input turned into a solution. Problem solved.