“Ask a designer to tell you about what he does, and more often than not, he’ll pull out a portfolio,” says David Grossman.
And that, says Grossman, is the result of flawed thinking.
Grossman is the president-elect of the International Council of Design (ico-D), a non-profit group dedicated to “being an international non-partisan and non-governmental representative voice for design”.
He spent a day at Flow Communications last week, getting to the bones of a skill and a service that is at the heart of communications, because as Grossman says, “human beings communicate visually”.
He believes the oft-used method of pulling out a portfolio of past work to talk about design, completely ignores the full scope of what a designer actually does – which is finding solutions to very abstract problems.
“These are photos of what you’ve done in the past. We are only as valuable as our ability to provide designing services. Value is not a portfolio of images. It is in the service,” he says.
Grossman – who is an environmental graphic designer and partner of Daedalos Design Studio in Tel Aviv – has encouraged designers to think deeply about this service, by first coming to grips with a definition of design that has nothing to do with “form, colour and shape”.
He says he began his search for this definition in quite a predictable place: a dictionary.
“Most of the definitions spoke to form, colour and shape,” he says, but he continued down the page until he came to a more medieval usage of the word “design”.
“It spoke about having ‘designs’ on the king,” he says with a smile. And that was what Oprah would probably call Grossman’s ah-ha moment.
“That definition of design is that ‘design is an application of intent’,” he says. That’s the definition that he feels is most useful to a designer.
“Every project has a brief and an intention. There is no way of doing design without knowing where you’re going.”
Design, he says, is also a process, and that is why designers who simply talk about their work in terms of a portfolio risk undervaluing the entire industry, because they’re celebrating the final design, and not the often intricate process of arriving at it.
“It’s not some kind of magic, or unknowable artistic inspiration,” Grossman says, “It’s something that can be taught and measured.”
And Grossman says it’s not difficult to measure the effect of of a design and decide whether it’s good or bad.
“For instance, if the point of your billboard was to direct people from point A to point B and 90% of people get there, then you know it’s a good design. If 50% of people say they had difficulties getting there, you know it’s not a good design.”
“Remember that design is a process. It is a process of stages, in which you should develop a range of options and then stop, compare and decide between those options,” Grossman says.
It’s this critical process that Grossman believes needs to be emphasised by all designers when talking about their work, to create a shift in the understanding of the role that designers play in a project.
“This can have far-reaching implications,” he says. “These include financial ones, because you’re now deciding on the value of the abstract process.”
Grossman says this kind of thinking has led some companies to realise the need for a designer at board level, because that application of intent, of creatively solving a problem, can ultimately affect every aspect of a project.
Flowstars say they left the session with much food for thought.
“It was insightful and thought-provoking looking at design, even for those who aren’t designers,” says Flow sub-editor, Carina van Wyk.
Flow designer George Xafis found the session inspiring, particularly Grossman’s take on the definition of design.
“It was was far from obvious until he explained it, and then it seemed very obvious, which shows how great he is at what he does,” Xafis says.
“Listening to him made me readjust the way that I think about design.”
