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The power of design

The power of design to shape understanding and belief

We are defined by our ability to use design to shape our understanding, beliefs, and how we see the world.

The myth of design: Fancy chairs

The role of design has many interpretations. When we say the word “design,” many images appear in people’s minds. A common one is that of an expensive, perhaps Italian, maybe reductive or ornamental, chair.
This interpretation of design is the most troubling and far from the truth: That design exists to produce products that are expensive, that are exclusive, that belong in a museum or a rich person’s house to be gazed at. I call this the Fancy Chair Myth, which narrows the purpose and role of design to something so extremely specific, ignoring the broader and much more significant way that design shapes our understanding, beliefs, and world. Apologies to these fancy chairs, as they are just innocent victims of how confused we can be about what design is.
The truth about design is it shapes our understanding of the world and our experience within it. What defines us as humans is our ability to design our world. Design is a man-made phenomenon eclipsing our natural environment. It is a veil we have created, reaching every aspect of our lives. How we wake up in the morning is designed through tools, technologies, furniture. As is the rest of our day—how we prioritize what’s important, how we communicate, how we work. Design informs whom we fall in love with, how we get the best deals on jeans, how we document sunsets. The impact of design extends from the physical world to how we understand ideas and what we identify with. It shapes how we understand our world, how we decide what is important, and, ultimately, what we believe in.

Design and understanding

We understand our world and the experiences within it through both logic and emotion: The curious mixture of the two creates individual meaning. Each of us responds to our own precise ratio of these two things, unique to our particular personalities. While many of us want to believe logic is the dominant lens through which we see the world, we are much more influenced by what we feel and what moves us — our intuition.
Our emotional world, complex and robust as it is, informs our decisions of what we love and hate, what we want to own, what we want to do, and ultimately who we want to be. The feeling that design triggers in us informs those instinctive responses — whether we notice, act, remember, or forget.
Imagine there is a spectrum with logic on one side and emotion on the other, each person landing on a different point in between. As designers, we must know where our audience falls on the spectrum, for it signifies the best approach to reach them. Their response — attention — is the first step to designing for understanding.
Design is the gateway to understanding, and this breaks down into three distinct components: what something is (the content of the message), what it looks like (the visual design), and what we think it is (how it is perceived). Designers tend to focus on the visual design without paying attention to how that informs what the audience will think it is. That approach is not enough. Visual design, alone, is not enough.
Successful design sends intentional messages to the audience and helps them understand what they are looking at. Likewise, if design is not functioning properly, it can confuse, mislead, or lose the audience’s attention.

When designing for understanding, keep the following in mind

Ensure what is most significant is also most visible. We see before we read. We form first impressions before we examine our judgments. Designers must make sure the most significant part of the message is also most visible.
Identify which parts of a design we need people to remember. Is it an emotional condition? Is it an urgency to act? Is it something that is brand new? Ensure those elements are clear.
Understand the complexity, or how much cognitive load is carried with the design. Be aware of what your design requires of your audience, and make sure it is appropriate for who they are and how much time they have to spend with the experience or artifact. The more complex it is, the more time your audience will need to understand it.
Test out your ideas frequently to learn about your audience. This is critical to understand what the people you are designing for will respond to.

The mystery of belief

Unlike designing for understanding, designing for belief-building is more mercurial and complex in nature. To illustrate this idea, let’s consider one of the most consequential, and fixed, forms of belief: religion. Think of someone you know who is religious, and imagine what it would take to change their belief system to a new one. No one’s mind is changed by stating facts or provoking disagreements. People’s beliefs and their identity are inseparable; we are defined by our beliefs. No one’s nature compels them to say, “I was wrong, I believe something different now.”
This makes belief-building even more challenging.
We live in a world where belief has eroded in the most visceral of ways. Throughout history, belief systems have kept communities together, aligned countries, connected individuals. We currently see a tectonic shift from belief to disbelief, modeled from the top of many governments. Facts and evidence have lost their luster as if they are collecting dust on a forgotten shelf in a corner. Believing something to be true is more informed by our community and identity than what factual evidence is placed in front of us. If anyone has let themselves get into a tangled political fight on Facebook, you probably have experienced this. No minds are changed despite the number of comments posted, despite the number of challenging facts offered. The desire for our beliefs to be true has become more powerful than the truth itself.
To simplify: Many of us either believe fully or believe nothing.
Even with dedication, conscientiousness, and design rigor, there is still mystery in what moves people toward changing their beliefs. There is no set of ingredients that are universal in opening someone’s mind toward a new point of view. We tend to design to general characteristics of our audience, but the more specific we can get for individuals, the deeper our understanding of their nuances and personalities, the higher the chance we have to help them see in a different way, and maybe believe something different.
At our best, if we provide a new approach or way of thinking, our audience will say to themselves, “Yes, I want that, versus what I have today.” Creating the desire for something new is almost more critical than creating a deep sense of understanding. Without the desire, without creating an imaginative space in our audience toward a preferred condition, we will fall short on our ambitions and the success of our work will be diminished.