Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/german-tradition-of-holistic-design-and-its-relations-with-todays-ux-culture-346ee1c00a90?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Lico Takahashi <img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*q5StViSjl4qba3AId8h6gw.jpeg">
Studying UX at a graduate school is not always a comfortable experience. After I finished the hectic first semester, I was having a kind of mental breakdown. What am I studying here? What kind of skills have I learned? I’m doing interviews, creating personas and storyboards, analyzing tasks, making primitive paper prototypes, and testing them with users— but can I offer a “design” solution by doing such things? Am I maybe in a totally wrong place?
Everything I study here seemed overly basic and general, lacking tangible knowledge or skills. Interdisciplinary approaches seemed to generate confusions rather than solutions. Even those colorful Post-Its seemed so lame to me (I admit I watched <a href="http://99u.com/videos/55967/natasha-jen-design-thinking-is-bullshit">the talk by Natasha Jen</a> more than once). I could imagine myself, a few years from now, suffering from a serious <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/75699/what-imposter-syndrome-and-what-can-you-do-about-it">imposter syndrome</a>. Everyone in the UX community seemed to have cool graphic design skills, and to know how to create sophisticated user interfaces using a variety of expensive tools. After all, that’s why they are called UX designers, isn’t it?
I was in this mist of uncertainty when I came across the name of Max Bense, a German philosopher who taught at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_School_of_Design">Ulm School of Design</a>, a short-lived but highly influential school which stemmed from the famous German design school <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus">Bauhaus</a>. Learning about Bense’s innovative approaches opened me up to a new perspective on design.
<h3>Ulm School and its Holistic Approach to Design</h3>
Ulm School of Design was founded in 1953 in the city of Ulm, located in southern Germany. Founded by former students of Bauhaus, the school had a unique and clear vision of design, that was “no ornaments, no styling, few color, simple geometrical forms and a very puritan way of designing products, visual communication and buildings” (<a href="http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/conferences/CD_doNotOpen/ADC/final_paper/025.pdf">Buerdek 2002</a>). The <a href="https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/works/design-classics/ulmer-hocker/">Ulm Stool</a>, designed by one of the founders Max Bill, embodies the idea perfectly.
<img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/450/1*viJYh_p8VwxMkxWzvcXGZg.jpeg">Ulm Stool, a simple and sturdy furniture suitable for various purposes. (image from NOVA68.com)
Although the Ulm School of Design’s most renowned departments are product design and visual communication, there existed a small but influential department that contributed to the unique education of the entire school. It was called the Information Department.
To understand the origin of the Information Department, it is useful to look at some pre-history of the school.
<blockquote>The plans for the Ulm School were driven by an anti-fascist, democratic impetus. Inge Scholl, the later initiator and founder of [Ulm School of Design], and her younger siblings Hans and Sophie had initially been engaged in the Hitler Youth in Ulm. However, with the beginning of World War II, Hans and Sophie Scholl started to turn away from Nazism and eventually became active resistors in the ‘White Rose’ circle.(<a href="http://www.proceedings.blucher.com.br/article-details/the-information-department-at-the-ulm-school-of-design-8554">Oswald 2012</a>)</blockquote>
For the founders, it was an urgent mission “to rescue the the concept of Industriekultur from Nazi corruption by regrounding it with humanist tradition of social responsibility and moral education” (<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511852">Betts 1998</a>). That’s why they included politics and journalism in their holistic sets of faculties.
<img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*D_O-fhJ6Od3JyuFzLTGTRA.png">A diagram that illustrates the school’s holistic approach to design. (source: Scholl, I. &amp; Aicher, O. ca. 1951. School of design — Research Institute of Product Form. Undated script)
<h3>Bense’s Ambition to Measure the Beauty</h3>
The Information Department was originally supposed to teach journalism and advertisement. Max Bill, a hugely influential designer and one of the founders of Ulm School of Design, asked the lecturers to teach “sharp advertising copy and slogans” (<a href="https://www.amazon.de/dp/3518802305/">Schmidt 2008</a>). However, the lecturers refused to do it. Arno Schmidt, an avant-garde writer who was expected to lead the department, quit after a hefty quarrel with Max Bill, practically saying “Do not even think I will sell your nicely designed toilet lids” (Oswald 2012).
From around 1955, Max Bense began taking clear initiative of the department. Though he was only a part-time department head, since he was working as a full professor of philosophy at Stuttgart University, he took responsibility for the curriculum and published his ambitious plans for the department. He proposed 30 subjects including:
<ul>
<li>Conversion of natural languages and artificial languages into precise languages.</li>
<li>Experiments on grid systems, shortening techniques and montage techniques.</li>
<li>Concentration and dispersation of form and topics.</li>
<li>Syntactic and semantic shortening, compression, distortion, lengthening, alienation.</li>
<li>Accidental and attributive descriptions, phenomenological reduction and deflation of meaning.</li>
</ul>
What Bense tried to do was to bring science into aesthetics of visual and verbal communication. In particular, he believed that the value of a text should be evaluated scientifically, by precise analytic means such as statistics, logic, and syntactics. “Just like artistic painting was regarded useless for visual communication, an artistic approach to text was considered useless for contemporary verbal communication” (Oswald 2012).
Bense was too busy to teach all the subjects because of his job in Stuttgart, so he recruited his colleagues to teach in Ulm. Bense’s colleagues began teaching not only in information department but also in shared subjects for students of all departments of Ulm School of Design. Oswald argues that it was this influx that formed “the schools tendency towards a greater integration of scientific methods into the design process”.
<h3>Is Design Art or Science?</h3>
Considering the time background, it would be reasonable to assume that Bense was highly influenced by Claude Shannon’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory">Information Theory</a>. Shannon’s landmark paper, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication">A Mathematical Theory of Communication</a>, was published in 1948, shortly before Ulm School of Design was founded.
Information theory is essentially the mathematics behind the digital revolution. Computer science, modern telecommunications and cryptography all derived from the theory. A physicist and philosopher James Owen Weatherall describes the impact of information theory as follows:
<blockquote>“Shannon’s groundbreaking idea was that you could study the information itself — the stuff that’s carried by the light waves from objects in the world to your retinas, or the stuff that passes from one person to another when they speak — independently of the waves and the words. It is hard to overstate how important this idea would become.” (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Wall-Street-Predicting-Unpredictable/dp/0544112431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1513506761&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=physics+of+wall+street">Weatherall 2012</a>)</blockquote>
In Shannon’s information theory, the amount of information is evaluated statistically. The basic idea is that “the amount of information carried by a signal has something to do with how easy it is for the receiver to decode, or in other words, on how unpredictable the signal is” (ibid.). An information-sparse signal can be decoded easily even when it is delivered in a lot of noise, because it is highly predictable (e.g. conversation about today’s weather, or complaints about traffic). On the other hand, an information-rich signal can not be decoded or predicted easily (e.g. details of a new film the receiver hasn’t seen, or an explanation of a new scientific discovery).
You don’t have to understand the details of Shannon’s theory, but the important thing is that he changed the basic understandings of information and communication. Information became independent from its containers, and it became measurable by means of mathematics. And that was basically what Bense aspired in the context of design — breaking down the design into pure mathematical elements, and measuring them numerically and statistically.
Did Bense succeed? Well, we can’t say that he solved design problems by his information approach. Oswald says, “the proposed quantitative analysis of art and design artefacts did not show relevance, neither for ‘beauty’ nor for what now is called usability”. However, the stir he caused in design education has spread beyond disciplines, in and out of the country. His unique approach attracted a lot of controversy about the relationship between design and science. “The result is valid until today: Design cannot be completely absorbed in science, and not at all in ‘artistic intuition’” .
<h3>Today’s UX Design and Education</h3>
Today, in Germany and in other countries, UX design and Human Computer Interaction are taught in highly interdisciplinary ways, just like Ulm School of Design. In the context of user experience, the word “design” has become to be used in a much broader sense than its visual expressions.
Still, there are confusions and misunderstandings that the outputs of a designer’s work should be visual expressions, such as web designs or (visible part of) user interfaces. We need to make it clear that graphics is not the core of design; it is just an instrument.
<blockquote>If we really want to educate communication designers, as opposed to graphic designers, then we should deal with all aspects of communication — visual and verbal. Otherwise design will continue to offer superficial auxiliary services. (Oswald 2012)</blockquote>
We design communication itself, not the vehicles of it. We design for people, instead of designing for materials. It doesn’t matter if you use paper, graphic softwares, cardboards, plastics, or even words. As long as you try to create better communication, and tackle the problem with interdisciplinary ways rather than purely aesthetic (or purely scientific) ways, you are absolutely a designer.
In the age of new user interfaces such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, Oculus Rift and Microsoft Hololens, designing communication and experience is becoming more and more important compared to conventional graphical approaches. Bense might have been too early to come — today his concept of designing information seems to make much more sense. Design theory and practice have evolved since then, and we have gotten large variety of tools from interviewing and observation to testing and evaluation. Each tool might seem fragile, as it is mainly based not on science but on human aspects. Nevertheless, by combining tools from different disciplines, we can design a rich and comprehensive user experience in virtually any context. And that is why I study human-centered methods and processes every day.
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The German Tradition of Holistic Design and its Relations with Today’s UX Culture

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