Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Paul Nylund Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

I want to talk about something that’s been bugging me lately. While design is discussed in great magnitude across the internets, I’ve observed a lapse in understanding about what it actually is, as well as what differentiates it from art. Contrary to the latter, design should serve a purpose. Moreover, design should be functional.

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful. — Dieter Rams

To better understand this, it’s important to grasp the concept of cognitive distribution and distortions. In short, cognitive distribution describes how people and things interact with each other to impact their own capacity to influence or understand their personal reality (it’s an endless field of academic research). Cognitive distortion describes the effects of long-term and short-term memories on our individual perceptions of reality.

Photo by Ali Inay on Unsplash

According to Yurica and DiTomasso (2005), there are two primary types of cognitive distortions: Fundamental Beliefs / Schemas that are shaped by past experiences and Secondary Beliefs that are based on habitual assumptions. While I highly recommend reading the article yourself, the following are just a few examples of these distortions:

Mind Reading and Personalization “I know what you’re thinking.”
Selective Abstraction “I’m just going to focus what I think it should be.”
Dichotomous / Black-and-White Thinking “It absolutely should be like this.”
Fortunetelling “I think it’s supposed to do this when I push it.”
Magnification “This simple color palette must carry some hidden meaning.”

The point here is that it is very difficult to guarantee a product’s effect on a user, because each one of its users carries a lifetime of experiences with them that serve to distort their understanding of the product.

This reallocates the burden of problem-solving from the designer to the users themselves. Respectfully, designers must allow other people to express themselves through an environment that he or she has constructed — whether that is brought into being via an app, a chair, or something completely different.

The “perfect spot” for a coffee cup — photo by yours truly

‘Affordance’ is a great word, coined by psychologist, J. J. Gibson in 1977 and popularized by Don Norman in 1988 in his “smash hit” book, The Design of Everyday Things. Affordances are essentially suggestions made by a thing about its potential uses. The better designers are at treading the fine line of subtle affordance, the greater personal impact products can have in their respective environments.

The limit of our power as designers is affording usages. Challenge users, and the difference between designers and artists is easily muddled. Interaction designers should utilize the theories mentioned thus far (and much more) in order to design experience frameworks, or rather, environments through which users are able to formulate their own experiences.

Paul Nylund is a native Angeleno pursuing B.Eng. Interaction Design at University of Southern Denmark with over 7 years product experience at more than 10 startups across Los Angeles, New York, Denmark and Norway. He’s passionate about functional design as it applies to ubiquitous computing and calm technology, bringing the future into present tense through design thinking. Check out his portfolio here.

Design is Not Aesthetic. was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design is Not Aesthetic.

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