How Design Makes the World

by Scott Berkun

As a general rule, the decisions you make first on a project have the most freedom, and the decisions you make last have the least. If style and the message it sends is important, then, these choices must be considered from the start.

style can’t be a last thought, unless style is unimportant.

design, at its best, is a collaborative process.

As a rule, the better designed a thing is, the earlier designers were involved in how that thing was made, and the more collaboratively they worked together.

The McDonald’s logo, like those of most fast-food corporations, works because of the consistency of the product (even if experts tell us it’s not healthy). Anytime you see that logo, even if you’re five hundred miles from home, you know exactly what the experience of eating there will be like. That’s why it works: the brand, the product and the expectations all line up together.

it’s well documented in psychology studies that most people, most of the time, like to feel in control of things, including elevators.

In general, good designers study the limited mental models that people have, as well as the more accurate ones, and create ways to navigate the gaps.

It seems counterintuitive to design for irrationality, but people are rarely as rational as we presume.

The danger is that design is often used as a shallow term to describe just the surface, distracting us from what matters most. Consumer culture makes it easy to believe that the ideal life is a series of intense but shallow pleasures, rather than a balance with deeper ones.

Thinking about how something works means considering the totality of what that thing is for, what role it will play in someone’s entire life and its total impact on the world.

it has always been hard for people with good ideas to find others willing to pay them.

The success of people with ideas has always depended not on their creative talents alone but on their ability to persuade.

The lack of good design in terms of safety, or of many aspects of quality, can be seen as a kind of negative externality.

One of the great rises of the design profession happened because of this very situation.

“There are professions more harmful than... design, but only a few... by creating whole species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air... designers have become a dangerous breed.”

progress is rarely measured against the regress it creates.

whenever you see a design that could be better, remember: someone has to pay for better design, and that’s the organization that makes it, the customer who buys it or the government that subsidizes it.

Few think of it this way, but executives are designers, too. Organizational designers. By choosing the strategy, the budget, the culture and who they hire, they have more impact on whether good design is possible than the designers themselves.

What makes good or bad design happen anywhere depends on who has the most power.

“Behind every distinctive building is an equally distinctive client.”

Often there’s more than one person in power, and it’s their capacity to collaborate that defines what’s possible.

People in power often prioritize their own interests, which means good design to them is that which helps them protect their power. The concerns of the people who will deal with the consequences, perhaps citizens, are secondary at best.

“Organizations... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

the limitations of an organization’s politics are expressed in the design of the things they produce.

Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East,

Many wonder why the Middle East seems to always be in trouble.

While there are many factors, one compelling lens is that people in power, often foreigners, chose the borders to be where they are.

Most Americans assume the free market decides the fate of neighborhoods, and is why some struggle and others thrive, but that’s often not true.

“people are lulled to sleep thinking that certain things happened by default, rather than by design.”

All good problem solving involves diagnosis.

Designers call the way they work, from diagnosing problems all the way through to solving them, their process. It includes how they start a project, the questions they ask, the way they explore different ideas and how they lead all those tasks toward a good solution.

In a way, deciding what kinds of research to do, and doing it with a minimum of bias, is a design problem, which explains why design research is a profession unto itself.

One surprise is how often the definition of the improvement, or problem to solve, gets refined as create–learn loops are done.

there is a craft to defining problems that’s as important as designing solutions. This is called framing the problem—how changing your point of view, even if the object is the same, changes its meaning

Efficiency is often taught to mean working in a straight line, but the trap is that efficiency is not the same as quality. If you want quality to improve, it’s going to take more time, or more thoughtful use of time.

We could invent the term surgeon thinking and offer a set of steps that brain surgeons follow, but, unlike with design thinking, few would believe that knowing the steps alone gives you the abilities of a surgeon.

Understanding design thinking isn’t the same as being good at design doing, but it can help people on their way.

It’s a major belief many designers have: why shouldn’t everything be better? Designers are always looking, thinking and sketching: it’s a habit many find hard to turn off, which is part of what makes them good designers in the first place.

In general, it’s a dangerous habit for designers to presume their skills can compensate for domain ignorance.

Designers should use the golden rule when publicly criticizing other designer’s work.

A designer could say, “I’m just the designer. It’s not my problem if the design can’t be easily built.” But that’s like saying, “I’m just the doctor. If my cure can’t easily be given to a person, that’s not my problem.”

Real design means working with real constraints, however challenging they are.

Good designers don’t fear constraints. They want to solve real proble...

Drive-by design is fine as intellectual exercise, but often it’s confused with, or seen as preferable...

good] designers are facilitators, they assist others in refining and transmitting ideas.”

Wise designers treat design like an investigation and seek out overlooked people rather than avoiding them.

how can a designer synthesize all the perspectives, and lead people to agree on the best decisions? The answer is facilitation, and clarifying whose role is to advise, and whose role is to decide.

It’s true that having too many cooks is a common reason projects fail. But having too few cooks, or, more precisely, arrogant cooks who seek out too few sources of knowledge, is just as dangerous.

The design we experience is the tip of the iceberg of business, organizational and engineering challenges the designer had to manage.

if an organization is bad at making decisions, they’ll be bad at making design decisions, too.