Interactions - September/October 2010

EDITOR Hugh Dubberly hugh@dubberly.com

then the details of the experience are painstakingly worked out.” Doblin cites as examples restaurants, worlds fairs, the South Street Seaport, and Disneyland. (Doblin’s emphasis on experience prefigures discussions of experience design and service design by several years.)

5. Performance Multisystems Design. Groups of competing unisystems. Doblin gives no examples of performance multisystems.

6. Appearance Multisystems Design. Also groups of
competing unisystems, and again Doblin gives no
examples, nor does he distinguish performance
multisystems from appearance multisystems.
In fact he says, “design approaches for these two
types of multisystems are similar.” This comment
is odd given that one of Doblin’s goals for the model
is to present “how design methods and design
specialists can be matched to the problems.” He
notes, “Just as there are six distinguishable types
of design, there are six different kinds of design-
ers. It is a rare designer who is competent in more
than one design type. The capability and experi-
ence required in one arena may actually obstruct a
designer’s competence in another.”
Yet, Doblin himself questions the distinc-
tion between performance and appearance,
“Unfortunately, the threshold separating perfor-
mance products from appearance products can
be fugitive, and is sometimes confused when the
designer has one goal, the user another.” Of course,
no product or system is all about form or all about
function; all products and all systems have formal
and functional aspects—and other aspects, too.

Perhaps we need to reconsider Doblin’s y-axis.

I propose substituting Charles Morris’s model of “sign function,” which he describes as having three levels—syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic [ 2]—and incorporating Thomas Ockerse’s argument that the result of any design process is a sign (in the semiotic sense). That is, anything that has been designed acts as a sign—loosely, it stands for something [ 3]. (Rhetoricians might say anything that has been designed makes an argument or arguments, including arguments for itself.)

If the result of the design process is a sign, then we may apply Morris’s model of sign function to things that have been designed—or more broadly to the space of things that can be designed.