Design · does it appeal?
Do you already wonder about any of this?
Fourteen questions about things somebody made on purpose. None of them are about careers, and none need you to be able to draw. The point is not the answers — it is whether working them out sounds like a good afternoon or a dull one. That reaction tells you more than any amount of reading about what designers do.
Answers are still being checked. 0 of 14 answers are verified and shown below. Verified here would mean the answer has been checked against an institute's own material, a manufacturer's specification or a published standard, and cites it. Most of these will stay questions, and not because nobody has got round to them: several ask why somebody decided something, and the honest answer is that the decision is visible while the reasoning is not. Reading intent from an object is the skill; it is not a fact to be looked up.
Things you use without looking
Why do you push some doors that say pull?
It happens to everyone, on the same doors, repeatedly. That pattern is a clue that the person is not the problem.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That an object can tell you what to do without a word, and that a label is what gets added when the shape is already saying the wrong thing. Once you see a sign as an apology for a design, you cannot unsee it — and you start finding them everywhere.
Why are the hot and cold taps the way round they are, everywhere?
Almost nobody has been taught this, and almost everybody gets it right in an unfamiliar bathroom.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That a convention does work that no individual object could do alone. Standards are invisible until they are broken, and deciding when to follow one and when to depart from it is a real decision with real costs on both sides.
A remote control has too many buttons. Whose fault is that, and what were they avoiding?
Nobody set out to make it confusing. Working out what they were optimising for instead is the exercise.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That a bad outcome often comes from a reasonable process — features requested one at a time, each defensible, none refused. Designing is largely the discipline of saying no, and this is the object that proves it.
Why do most packets tear badly, when the ones that tear well cost the same?
Somebody has solved this. Most packets have not adopted it, and the reason is not that nobody noticed.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That a design decision is made inside constraints you cannot see from outside — what the existing machine can do, what the line was set up for, what changing it would cost. The interesting question is rarely "why is this bad" and usually "what would it have taken for this to be good".
Things that tell you what to do
A form asks for your name in three boxes. What is that form actually for?
It is not for you, which explains most of what is wrong with it.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That a thing can be designed for the person receiving it rather than the person using it, and that most frustrating objects are frustrating because of who they were designed for. Asking "for whom" before "is it good" reorders every judgement that follows.
Why do some queues have ropes and some do not, and what do the ropes actually do?
The rope is not stopping anybody. It is doing something else, and it works.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That behaviour can be shaped without instruction or enforcement. A great deal of design is arranging a situation so the right thing is the easy thing, which is a quieter and more powerful tool than telling people what to do.
Look at a railway station sign. Why that size, that colour, that height?
Every one of those was decided, and most of them were decided for somebody with worse eyesight, less time and more luggage than you.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. Designing for the hardest case rather than the average one. It is the difference between something that works when you are calm and something that works when you are late, and it is where accessibility stops being a separate topic.
Clothes and objects
Two shirts, same cloth, same factory town, very different prices. What is the difference made of?
Some of the answer is cynical and some of it is not, and separating those is the whole question.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That an object carries cost, work, story and signal at once, and that price is about all four. Anyone who wants to make things for a living has to be honest about which of those they are adding.
Why does a size that fits you in one shop not fit in the next?
There is a real answer involving bodies, measurement and who was measured, and it is more interesting than "sizes are meaningless".
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That making anything for many people requires deciding which people, and that the decision is usually made once, long ago, by someone who did not think of it as a decision. Standards carry the assumptions of whoever set them.
Clothes are made faster and cheaper than ever. Who is paying for the difference?
Someone is. The question is only whether it is the buyer, the maker or somewhere else entirely.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. Following a cost through a system to where it actually lands. It is the same move commerce asks for, applied to making things — and in this field it is the question that decides what kind of work you are willing to do.
Made in numbers
Why is a handmade thing expensive and a machine-made copy cheap, when the machine one took more effort to design?
All the thinking happened once, before the first one existed. That changes the arithmetic completely.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. The difference between the cost of designing and the cost of making, and why designing for many is a different discipline from making one. It is the hinge between craft and industrial design, and people who confuse the two are unhappy in whichever they end up in.
Why does a cheap thing that breaks often survive in the market against a better one?
It is not only that people cannot afford the better one, though that is part of it.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That the best design does not win by being best, and that reach, repairability, familiarity and what a shopkeeper will stock all decide outcomes. Designers who ignore this make things that are admired and not used.
Why do so many new things look like the thing they replaced?
Early cars looked like carriages. Early apps looked like paper. It keeps happening, which suggests it is doing something.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That familiarity is a resource and a trap at once — it makes a new thing usable and stops it becoming what it could be. Knowing when to keep a borrowed form and when to drop it is one of the genuinely hard judgements in this field.
The harder question
If a design makes people do something they would not otherwise do, is that good design?
It is certainly effective design, and the two words are not the same. This is the question the field argues about most and settles least.
Answer being checked against the primary text before it goes up.
What answering it involves. That skill and intent are separable, and that being good at shaping behaviour makes the question of what you shape it towards your problem rather than somebody else's. It is the ethical question at the centre of this work, and it arrives early in a career, usually as a brief.
What these have in common. Notice what these have in common. Every one of them is about something that could have been otherwise. Nothing you use was inevitable — somebody chose it, under constraints you cannot see, for a person who may not have been you. Design is the habit of asking who decided and what they were working with, and it has far less to do with drawing than the subject's reputation suggests.
Whether it is you
| Worth a closer look if… | Probably not, if… |
|---|---|
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Am I already late?
Almost certainly not, and the answer depends on where you are standing rather than on how much you have done.
| If you are in | Then |
|---|---|
| Class 10 | The subject answer here is split, so read it carefully. One of the entrances in this catalogue takes every stream; the other requires Mathematics at Class 11 and 12, because it leads to architecture. If either might interest you, keeping Maths keeps both open. And start making things — badly, for yourself, without a course — because that is preparation here in a way it is nowhere else on this site. |
| Class 11 | Keep a folder. Everything you make, including the parts that failed, and something written about what you would change. That is not a portfolio yet and it is what a portfolio is later made from — and it cannot be assembled in the last three months, which is the mistake this field's applicants make most. |
| Class 12 | Preparation now is a mixture of the paper and the work, and the balance is not obvious. Read the exam pages: one of these entrances runs a situation test and an interview after the written paper, which rewards something completely different from a syllabus. Coaching for the written half while neglecting the other is the commonest way to be well prepared for the wrong thing. |
Books, none of them preparation
The cheapest way to find out whether any of this interests you. None of these are preparation material, none will help you pass anything, and none of them will teach you to draw. If you cannot put one of them down, that is a better signal than any portfolio class.
| Book | Author | Why this one |
|---|---|---|
| Design as Art | Bruno Munari | Short essays on lamps, forks, trees and posters by a designer who found ordinary objects genuinely funny. The best first book here, and readable in pieces on a bus. |
| The Design of Everyday Things | Don Norman | Why you push doors that say pull. It is also on the engineering page, for a different reason — there it is about the user, here it is the whole job — and noticing why one book serves both is a useful thing to notice. |
| Ways of Seeing | John Berger | How images persuade, and who benefits. Short, argumentative, and the book most likely to change how you read an advertisement on the way home. |
| The Craftsman | Richard Sennett | Making as a way of thinking rather than a way of producing. The most demanding book on this list and the one that takes the work most seriously. |
| Steal Like an Artist | Austin Kleon | On influence, copying and where original work actually comes from. Slight, quick, and honest about the part of this field that anxious beginners get most wrong. |
If that held your attention: where this field actually leads →
If you read these and started noticing things you have walked past for years, that is worth paying attention to — noticing is most of the job. If you read them and felt nothing, that is just as useful and it cost you four minutes. Neither reaction is the right one.