Design Anchors and Time
Big Basics and Small Radicals
This week’s newsletter is from Henry Lee. Henry is an innovative interdisciplinary designer and researcher with a passion for creating human-centered experiences through a blend of research and design intelligence.
Intro
Objects self-situate within time periods. Self-situating means that objects reside within a time period based on their properties. By observing, with only a quick glance, most of us may discern the material, the form, and the condition of a human-made object — both physical and digital objects. We can then determine what time period the object is from. In design terms, we can identify basic design trends, styles, decades, and even centuries based on when the object existed.
But what happens when a human-made object exists for such short periods of time that it is nearly nonexistent to our minds? What happens to a product when it isn’t around long enough to be placed within a time period?
Think about time in nature.
Scales can be massive, such as the geological time scale which can be millions of years, or relatively small, such as the life of a single-celled organism. Now, think about time scales in relation to human-made objects. Think of art, design, engineering, and architecture. Many old cities and their buildings have stood for centuries, and certain objects are used for decades. Industrial objects, for example, are more obviously placed in a time, themselves referring to the Industrial Revolution and what followed. But modern objects, aided by globalization and social media, are often timeless. We scroll through endless digital advertisements and stroll by countless aisles of physical goods for sale. Many of the products are one-use, or quickly disposed of. Some are never used.
How might we avoid designing physical and digital objects that quickly disappear into the sea of time and fast-moving trends, and are able to anchor themselves for a longer period of time and within a deepened experience?
There isn’t one correct way, but I propose designing with big basics and small radicals.
Basics or Radicals
The first thing I’d like to discuss is the decision to be basic or to be radical, when it comes to products and the experience of a product, and their conception, design, implementation, and launch.
Basic refers to simple concepts and features added to a product, while radical refers to the large changes made. Small steps versus large leaps. We sometimes assume that a product needs to be radical to be successful in an inundated market.
Radical products are being released daily, but how successful are they? We hear regularly about the few successful startups and novel ideas or new products, but rarely do startups or new products succeed in taking a hold on the market and surviving the first few years. Success can also be defined as having an impact on culture or future products, even if the business endeavor fails. But startups will fail about 9 out of 10 times, and crowdfunding platforms have only marginally better percentages. Yes, a radical product can certainly anchor itself in time, but so can a basic product. You don’t need a brand new technology for a proper product success.
In the book, The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman states that, “technology changes rapidly, but people and culture change slowly.” He points out that it can take mere months for product development and launch, but decades for consumers to accept new products and features.
Is your product capable of lasting long enough for it to be adopted? It doesn’t always take time to establish a product, but growing a dedicated base of users typically doesn’t happen overnight.
As a designer, I often take into account if there is enough time for the consumer to adopt the changes to the product I am proposing.
Will this product be around for days or decades, and will there be enough time to adopt radical changes designed in it? Or should I design most of the product according to the basics, and add in only the smaller radical changes? There isn’t a right decision overall, but asking the question has helped make me a better designer and consultant.
I often advise other designers and business owners to stick to the basics when possible, and only add radical change when it will clearly benefit the consumer and make the product standout. From personal experience trying to design radically, I have found that it often gets in the way of the basics of what the product needs to do in the first place. There may be some fancy new feature that you’d like to implement, but it’s important that the product does the minimum needed to be successful. Then you can add in the more radical changes.
A Case for Big Basics and Small Radicals
The basics have been around for a while for a reason. Generally designing according to tested principles ensures that your design will stick around long enough for the small improvements you make to be properly adopted.
This means that designing with the basics, but adding smaller radical changes, is a good strategy to take.
We can see many large consumer tech companies taking this approach. For example, phone product lines typically change incrementally, adding smaller, but useful, radical features from time to time. In each update to the physical good or software embedded, small changes are made. But the basics often stay the same.
The basics of design are what anchor something in time periods long enough for the radicals of a product to shine through. This isn’t to say that larger radical designs should never happen, but I’m arguing for a kind of incrementalism. One small step at a time. Sometimes we hear the phrase, “minimum viable product,” and you could say that I’m also agreeing with that concept.
What are the basics that make the product work? After which you can ask what the smaller radicals are that set it apart. If you can achieve the small basics of an established product, then space is created to design radically.
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