A Carnegie Mellon professor once said, "Our duty as designers is to rid the world of ugliness." Over a decade later, I still take that responsibility to heart. I interpret "ugliness" as ill-defined purpose, poor function, confusing directions, frustrating experiences.
Designers solve problems. They reduce clutter and incorporate more intuitive, aesthetic outcomes to improve human interactions. There is reason, passion and/or cognition; there is strategy, intention and purpose. It is not as much about invention as innovation, to connect the dots and improve upon them. For instance, I walk into a bagel shop or an ice cream parlor and immediately see opportunity — fix the ingress/egress, print the menu board to improve readability, rearrange the layout chairs and tables. It is simple things that would take a literal hole in the wall, patch it and completely transform the space. Everything artificial is designed in some form or fashion. Whether it is a parking lot, presentation deck, coffee pot or cellular phone, everything relies on interactions with the end goal (hopefully) to improve the function, value and appearance based on human-factors. It may seem pompous, or lofty, to think Designers are the world's fixers but they sure do make life more practical, pleasant and beautiful. I recently started watching the TV show Portlandia. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein capture how restaurants attempt to enhance the customer experience by offering high customization but instead unnecessarily complicate it. In this case, there are so many steps that the reason the customer came in the first place (to get a Pastrami sandwich) never actually happens. The navigation, order process, delivery, customer service, signage, all severely impact the dining experience. The restaurant took something easy and made it hard, which becomes even more difficult when you are hungry. It reminds me that efficiency and effectiveness are key components to any experience. This restaurant designer clearly did not take her customer experience into consideration! (I'm fully aware this is satire.) I just listened to the “Yanny vs. Laurel” sound clip for the first time. With all the social media buzz about it, I figured I'd write down what I heard and then compare with others.
Without any context, what I heard was incoherent and resembled something like “Yehme” or “Jimmy” so I wrote that down on the paper. We flipped it over at the same time, and I was absolutely shocked to read “Laurel” on the other page. How could we hear such drastically different sounds? I did not hear anything remotely close to Laurel! Then I heard a version that accentuated the frequencies to highlight Yanny (high) and Laurel (low). Either way, why was I originally hearing neither? It really makes me think how many things in our everyday life are believed to be objective but yet interpreted so differently. Our senses challenge our sense of the world. |