AHO WORKS StudieS 2011-2012
Institute of Design
Can Designers Design Anything?
tasks where there is no wrong or right answer.
The doctors result is far easier to measure.
Either the patient is healed or not. There are
grey zones in between but the goal is never-
theless defined. Ideally the patient returns to
a totally healed state. In design there are no
such ideals or given goals, only better or worse
resolutions. Designers have generally devel-
oped the skill to reach such resolutions based
on complex and fuzzy input. So the answer is
yes, a designer can design better than a non-
designer in any given situation within the
domain of design, even crossing the fields of
specialties within design.
Finally returning to the principal question
reformulated: Can designers take on any task
and design for any situation with a relative suc-
cess compared to non-designers?
This can be addressed in two ways: Since
designers are the ones who design they can
design for any situation in the same way as
doctors can attempt to heal any illness.
Can designers design successfully for any
situation? Obviously not, exactly as doctors
often are unsuccessful.
So the final answer to the question is:
Designers are fully justified and even to a cer-
tain degree qualified to design for any situa-
tion.
Are they successful in this? Sometimes.
Often not.
The issue designers should really be criticised
for is not having the self-confidence to design for
anything, but the nonchalance they tend to show
when designing for new fields. While design
migrates into ever new areas, design education
has been sleeping. We have underestimated the
processes designers have to go through when
moving into new fields and establishing new
specialties in those fields. We also have under-
estimated the need for learning to learn, to cope
with rapid learning processes when designing
for singular new challenges where establish-
ing specialties is not feasible. Designing for any
new field requires an intensive learning process
and the development of adaptive expertise. We
need to take on this challenge and change design
education so that designers are able to design
anything in a good manner.
Designers need to be self-confident and
humble when entering new fields for design.
They should be very self-confident because
designers indeed can do great things in are-
as where they traditionally have not been.
But without being humble about these fields,
their inherent knowledge, skills, and the need
to learn rapidly and depend on insider know-
ledge and expertise, designers risk superficial
results. And this lack of humility and willing-
ness to empathise and respect knowledge has
rightfully been criticised.
Systems Oriented Design, an approach deve-
loped by the author at AHO, aims at making
designers better at designing for complexity,
making them able to learn very quickly and to
become adaptive experts in the field of design.
