Monday May 19 12:23 PM
I was in an interesting class this morning with Joe Duffy where he talked about designing your life. It got me thinking about design, and how designers treat their audience. There's often an adversarial relationship between an artist and their audience. There's a tendency to view the audience as a demographic, and to blame the audience when a design fails.

The relationship should be a partnership. An author depends on his readers not just to know how to read, but also to get his cultural references and ideas. To pick up what he's putting down. It's the same for a designer: my audience must not only understand how my designs fit into their culture, but tell them a story which describes to them why I am trying to motivate them.

This implies that the audience is an integral part of the design. This is why market studies are done, if there is enough money being tossed around by the client. We are trying to get a feel for our audience, to understand their current motivations and how the new concepts we are supplying fits into and overlays those existing motivations.

The best design takes advantage of what the audience already knows and reinforces that, framing the discussion to point to the inevitable conclusion of the purpose of the design. It is a living partnership, and if the design fails it is the fault of the designer for not telling a good enough story, or using the wrong words to tell it.

User interface design is crucially dependent on the audience. User interface testing identifies how people actually use a website and helps them get where they're trying to go. If they can't find the information they're looking for, it is not because they don't know how to use their mouse, but because the designer has not tapped into the intuitive ways that people navigate their world.

This brings me back to Joe's seminar: he explained that he assembles a visual creative brief for his everyday life such as vacations and building his cabin. You could take that further and craft for yourself a visual identity, from the clothes you wear to the cars you drive to your interior design, fitting everything into a cohesive whole that represents who you want to be instead of who you are.

Everyone does this constantly and haphazardly; designing your life would put an order to this process, and provide reasons for doing what you do and liking what you like. A person is much like a brand identity, and instead of rejecting labels and consumerism one could embrace them and use them to create the image of the person they want to be.

This would involve some market research. After all, how many people know who they want to be? You'd be a focus group of one, highlighting some ideas and rejecting others, finding the patterns in your lifestyle and creating a template for the new you. The clothes, car and house would fit the pattern and though your audience might not grasp its entirety, they'd sense the underlying order and you'd begin to approach that vision of yourself as a brand.

My visual creative brief will have to include more naps.