Two venn diagrams are often used by designers to explain what they do.
Each triads presents design as pursuing an overlap of three primary values.
The first, and most common, formulated by IDEO, is the view of a designed solution from an organization’s perspective. A successful design solution is viable, feasible and desirable:
- Viable: the solution is advantageous to the organization
- Feasible: the solution is something the organization can actualize
- Desirable: the solution is something people want and will choose over other options
The second, invented by Liz Sanders, focuses on what makes people choose a solution. A successful design solution is useful, usable and desirable:
- Useful: the solution fulfills objective, functional needs
- Usable: the solution removes obstacles and interference from fulfilling needs
- Desirable: the solution is something people want, apart from functional needs
Notice that Desirable occurs in both triads.
Also notice that Desirable denotes a different concept in both diagrams, a fact easily missed by folks who think verbally.
But fascinatingly, despite this difference, in both diagrams it is always the element of Desirable that drops out first.
And this is because in both diagrams Desirable addresses subjective responses of people to an organization’s offering. These subjective responses motivate objective behaviors, and it is these behaviors that make a design system flourish or fail.
Subjectivity is difficult for most of us to think. This is because we naturally think objectively about physical and conceptual objects. When we use objective thought to understand objects (like engineered objects and object-systems and business objectives, and objective measurements of objectively observed behaviors) the understanding we develop serves our purposes.
But subjectivity confuses objective thinkers because any subjective difference projects a different objectivity into the reality we share. Each of us, walking into the same room notices different things in the environment, and these cause us to make different sense of things. A socially competitive person might look for signifiers of wealth or refinement. A germaphobe might see cleanliness or filth. An artist might notice the aesthetics and symbolic features of a room, indicating a personality or culture. An engineer might see an interesting device or mechanism. My wife senses a field of emotional interconnections, dense with possible stories. A police officer might detect evidence of what has happened or might happen in the room. A preoccupied person might notice only what they are thinking about or what they might be missing on the phone in their pocket.
This is why equating reality and objectivity is not only naive but reductive and, where people are concerned, inadequate. To know a person objectively is to impose one’s own objectivity upon them and to miss precisely those things that motivate behaviors that are, in fact, life and death matters for any organization.
But getting at these multiple objectivities requires a different mentality than business-as-usual objectivity.
This is what designers are supposed to do. But the demands to think objectively, strategize objectively, communicate objectively, plan objectively — these can interfere or even block subjective understanding.
I remember years ago I worked on a technical CMS implementation of a site I had designed myself. I had done extensive research with all the user segments. I had developed a nuanced understanding of where their needs, emotional motivations, perspectives and language differed and converged. I had sensitized myself to how each related differently to the same organization, and interacted with it differently. And the minute I began implementing this design system in this technical platform and started ranging with its myriad features and constraints, all that subjective multi-objectivity went right out the window. To get this engineering work done, I had to attune myself to the logic of this system, and I crystallized into single-logical engineer.
I could not be both an engineer and a designer.
This is why designers should not be shoved into slash roles. Designers need to focus on desirability, supported by a team where others focus on viability and feasibility and project management. If they are forced to do more, the desirability work will be eclipsed. A UX-Ui designer will become only a UI designer. A Service Designer who must also shoulder the weight of process engineering and business strategist might do a lot of service consulting and journey management coaching, but they’ll forget what it is to design.
Subjective understanding is both important and fragile. It requires cultivation and protection.
It is hard to develop and very easy to lose. After a point, it is not only lost, but forgotten.
And once it is forgotten the reasons for cultivating it and protecting it and valuing it are lost.
It starts first with loss of Desirability as something independent from Usable and Desirable. “If this thing is both Useful and Desirable, doesn’t that make it Desirable?” This collapse reduces designed things to mere utility. They work well, but no personal attachment forms between the person and the functional thing or with the organization who provides it. It is a functional transaction.
The next loss is Desirable as something requiring the same level of effort and specialization as Viable or Feasible. It is all leveled down to touch-points with useful features that do not introduce pain-points. Objects and more objects, measured objectively, producing measurable outcomes. The Desirability work is primarily a matter of identifying which parts of which objects to implement first in order to achieve which objectives. It is all easy to talk about, argue about, measure and reward. But, again, it produces nothing anyone can care about.
This is what happens when design is marginalized or refused the conditions required to do design work.
First comes the slash roles. Then come the slashed jobs.
Side note (mainly to myself): a general theory of Desirability. Desirability is rooted in service.
We need to serve — and to have our services needed, valued and received with gratitude.
We all need to be needed.
But we need to be needed in specific ways — according to our essential service.
If someone extracts service from us that is not the service we need and want to give — especially if our essential service is refused, devalued or made impossible — instead of feeling fulfilled purpose we feel used and degraded.
To understand a person’s essential service and to provide them opportunities to provide this service to others who will value it — and at the same time provide that person with services that allow them to focus on their essential services — this taps sources of value, motivation, loyalty, hope, resilience and a myriad other passions. An organization rooted in this kind of value will have charisma, soul, energy and je ne sais quoi far beyond a corporation that relies only on dollars and fear to drive its gears.
