Design as a Relationship of Purpose

A product is designed for its relationship with the Experience in the context of the Event for the purpose of the Big Idea.

The idea of drinking coffee dates back 500 years or so to the early Ottoman Empire. People gathered in Turkish coffee houses to drink strong brews from small cups. They smoked tobacco (and who knows what else) from communal hookahs and relaxed over genial conversations. This was an important social event, a celebration of humanity and community.

What is our current idea of drinking coffee? For many of us it is a drug that wakes us up in the morning. Coffee is something many of us "need." When you make products for this short focus, products for the product's sake, you move down the hierarchy of needs, from a less essential social want, to something on the level of a basic human need, like food.

By losing sight of the Big Idea, we might have reduced a social ritual to an anti-social addiction. Tea has suffered a similar fate. In Japan, for example, it was once the centre of an elaborate social ceremony; in the same country tea has been reduced to a quick fix you can get from a coin-operated vending machine. We have diminished many rituals and transformed them into mundane activities.

It is encouraging to see that in the United States and Canada, European style coffee houses - where people can sit and talk and linger over coffee - are coming back. The Big Idea of coffee is not dead, perhaps because the human need to socialize is stronger than products.

What has all this to do with design?

First, it shows how our focus on the shape of things can result in designs that contradict the original idea of the experience of the product. Second, it suggests that the key to more humane artifacts may be to direct the focus toward the Big Idea rather than aesthetics and form. If we cannot design for the Big Idea, the next best thing is to design for the Event.

Failing that, design for the Experience. I'm not saying you have to design the table and the spoon and everything listed under Experience and Event in the chart; but we must consider them as part of the delivery of the taste of coffee. This doesn't only apply to designers; design critics, educators, marketers and consumers all need to return to the Big Idea.

It is interesting to note that relationships with the Experience and the Event that are absent in the design process are usually made up for in advertising, with commercials and print ads that play up the context of the product. But a product that was designed properly would have done that on its own . If we design for the Big Idea, the product will express the aura of the Event and the Experience, so the advertising won't have to do it for us.

What are designers, manufacturers and marketers of coffee makers to make of this? Simply consider the Big Idea. Look at ways of filtering fresh water through ground, roasted coffee beans for better tasting coffee.

Another example of a product with an interesting relationship to its Big Idea is the wrist watch. Outside the Big Idea--the notion of time--the watch is just a piece of jewellery. We designers love to say "form follows function," but the "function" of the watch is not what dictates its design. The idea--the notion of time--is more powerful than the function, which is hands pointing to numbers. Another tenet of design is that every product should ideally communicate what it does. Then the graphics on the face of the watch should help to communicate its function. This gives us hundreds of years of clocks and watches with the same pattern of numbers.

Along comes the numberless Movado watch to defy this rule brilliantly. The Movado design tells us in essence, "You know how this works. You know how we organize time. We don't have to spell it out to you."

Another innovation is the watch face with scrambled numbers--all the wrong numbers in the right places--a sly parody of the ordinary analogue watch. Try that with a digital watch. You can't! Digital watches don't succeed simply because people don't think digitally. The numberless and jumbled watches were a revolution against the digital trend. The idea of time is not a digital idea; it is one of movement, of circles, as it has been since long before even the first sundials. The watch is not the design; the method of organizing time is the design.

The watch is an excellent example of a product that means nothing when you take it out of its context. Any product would lose its meaning without the Experience, the Event and the Big Idea.

A telephone that is not in use is just a piece of plastic with electronic guts in it. When it rings, it becomes a telephone; that is a "design moment."

A lamp is a meaningless object until you turn it on: another design moment. Sitting and reading a book under the lamp is an Event.

The knife is probably the most fascinating case study in the history of design for two reasons: it is the first active weapon; and it has transformed itself into a tool of daily life in the kitchen and at the dining table. Form follows the spirit of the relationship. One's relationship with the knife determines whether it will be a weapon or a tool for buttering bread at a dinner party.

All these examples can lead us to our first attempt at re-defining design: 

If Design is Product; Relationship is Experience and Event; Purpose is the Big Idea, then Design is a relationship of purpose. A product is designed for its relationship with the Experience in the context of the Event for the purpose of the Big Idea.

In the next section we will be exploring, among many other things, the importance of the conceptual framework by which the Big Idea becomes useful to people as an artifact, a book, a building, a service or an environment

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