Designing Worth — Connecting
Preferred Means to Desired Ends
Gilbert Cockton

University of Sunderland | gilbert.cockton@sunderland.ac.uk

“…thingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic, thus with the aim of defining, communication (to bind together the multiplicity of relationships, properties, activities).”

—Nietzsche, The Will to

Power (III Principles of a New Evaluation 558, 1887)

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fetishized world of “cool stuff,” we must relate the means of digital designs through the further means of interaction to the ends of people as users or consumers. Designing is thus not just a question of conceptualizing and realizing things (although without that there is no design), but also one of connecting between stuff and us.

[ 1] Mok, C. Designing Business. Hayden Books, 1996.

July + August 2008

[ 2] Tiplady, R. “Behind Philips High Design,” Business Week, October 21, 2005. <www.busi-nessweek.com/inno- vate/content/oct2005/ id20051025_243657. htm>. Accessed April 13, 2008.

Thingness is a consequence of physicality. Objects have boundaries, but even these are a function of context. Soak them, roast them, freeze them, squeeze them, drop them, or swing them and their forms may no longer endure. Our idealized reification of things strips away contingencies to construct “normal” encounters and usage, but every property that we attribute (e.g., color, weight, strength) is the result of interactions in context.

Digital objects have little in the way of obvious boundaries. They blend into the world of interactive usage, making it hard to assign fixed properties or qualities to them. The language and concepts of physical product design do not transfer well to interaction design. Few aesthetics of form can be immediately perceived, as with physical objects. The same holds for affordances, which are strictly physical (see Don Norman’s take on this in interactions May+June 1999). Instead, aesthetics and affordances unfold within the

user experience. Furthermore, users’ evaluations of interactions evolve beyond the “end” of an experience. What endures here cannot be properties of the digital artifact or the interaction. Rather, what endures are properties of the world, inscribed in people, places, and things. This is why we interact with all objects in the first place. Good experiences can give rise to revisitable good moods and enduring, reworkable memories. Good outcomes embed value in the world. Goodness here can be evaluated without any reference to the features or qualities of a digital artifact or a user’s experience of it. My writing as you now read it is good or bad independently of my writing experiences, or the feature set of the word processor that I used to write it.

If we think of designing qualities, properties, or value into artifacts, then we enter a nonsensical world critiqued by Nietzsche and many after him. Our world is one of relations, not things. Our intellectual challenge is to relate, not to excavate. The archaeologies of things are genealogical, not ontological. If we thus conceive just “a thing” during design, there is nothing to relate it to. We are reduced to making wild claims for deterministic properties of man-made objects that have power over others. To escape such a

designing as Sketching to Connect Within design the primacy of relations over objects is becoming established. For Clement Mok [ 1] the generic purpose of all design is to “create meaningful connections among people, ideas, art, and technology, shaping the way people understand their relationships with … new products.” Similarly, for Stefano Marzano “design is a connector, a synthesizer, and a translator. It’s a bridge between changes in the economy, in technology, and in industry. The result of the interaction between all these changes has to be brought to an aesthetic synthesis. The designer is the person who takes that final step towards this synthesis [ 2].” Sir George Cox too used a linking metaphor in his 2005 UK Department of Trade and Industry Review of Creativity in Business: “Design is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practi-