Is Design an International Language?

A world without words

History

From the beginning of time objects have held a special place in the human imagination: the pyramids, sports cars, suits and homewares all help form a tangible picture of who were are, where we come from and what we believe in.

In the ancient world different societies designed different artifacts, different architecture and different clothing and tools. These played an active role in describing different values and different ways of living which gave each society a special, concrete personality.

Because each society was obviously special and different, other societies wanted to trade with them in order to obtain desirable new objects, which were different from their own, and sometimes technologically more advanced. New objects often brought with them new ways of doing things which radically changed how people lived and worked.

This picture remains true today, although we live in a much more complex world with many common values, technologies, needs and market places.

Today’s objects, like those in the ancient world, continue to perform important roles within society; as totems to be prominently placed to act as markers publicly affirming our status in the world, and as talismans which are more discreetly placed to privately reassure us that we have individual personalities. Objects express our ties with society and the values that are important to us.

As the world becomes more complex and more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects within society. Successful buildings or products must be aesthetically functional—they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must perform well—they must feel appropriate or efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, intangible new technologies and help us understand and welcome the future.

Designers

Designers are a recent addition to the list of sorcerers, magicians, scribes, kings, architects and artists who have helped shape the world. All have helped direct the creation of cities from a confusion of dust and ritual, responding to the ancient human fear of chaos and disorder. Designers have subtly manipulated city plans, the form of buildings and objects, re-shaping and controlling the way we respond to the physical world. Design is the process of controlling the evolution of objects through manipulating the elements of culture and all of the human senses.

Cultural vocabularies

In fact, objects are the vocabulary in an ancient ‘grammatical toolkit’ which is a powerful international language in our eloquent ‘world without words’—a world where buildings and products act as ‘props and backdrops’, helping us to reassuringly order our chaotic dramas in the theatre of everyday life. Objects have many dimensions and there are many ways of analysing what they mean and how we should use them.

Like objects, typography acts as a ‘container for language’ changing it’s meaning in the same way as crystal glasses or plastic cups transform the value of the liquid contained inside. Science has taught us that there is no such thing as a two dimensional object. Even paper and ink have thickness and weight. Books move through time in the same way as we walk through buildings, watch film and videos or look at dancers perform movement scored in Labanotation.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar objects and environments in new ways, viewed from new angles in a new time.

The best definition of culture I have found is “social glue”, the stuff that binds us together and makes society. Because we are all part of culture it’s very difficult to stand aside from it to get a clearer view. There is no such thing as good culture or bad culture. Designers draw upon the aspects of culture which are most appropriate to understand and re-configure for the task in hand.

Designers create in a controlled way through manipulating a ‘cultural vocabulary’ made up of the elements of culture which (according to Umberto Eco and Dr Andy Lowe) includes language, myths, rituals, symbols and values.

They are like the skin of an onion which when peeled back reveal the ideologies—the fundamental driving forces that impel us into action and make us react to the object world around us.

Designers’ solutions, however well controlled, always contain an element of intuition which is unpredictable and uncontrollable. However, the larger part of the designers’ work involves underpinning intuition with analytical method including those offered by the social sciences.

Sensorial vocabularies

The way we create and use objects allows us to control one another and what we choose to disclose or obscure about our own personalities and those who commission or use objects.

The creative process of designing uses all of the human senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight. No matter where we come from, we are all essentially the same and react in approximately the same way to outside stimuli. We have common senses which designers manipulate in order to produce specific responses.

Designers use these sensorial vocabularies to give objects and spaces precise values in different societies. These values vary from culture to culture. In Europe we place a high value on personal objects which are small and heavy, in some Eastern cultures objects which are small and light are given a higher value. These intangible aspects of the designers’ vocabulary are less obvious but often more potent than concrete objects. They frequently produce subliminal responses and can replace the need for more physical and expensively constructed design solutions. Ironically it is smell, not sight, which is the most potent of the senses. Smell has the possibility of transporting us back to our childhood or to a specific place or person.

Sensorial vocabularies are only one element in the designers ‘grammatical toolkit’. In fact, there are many different ‘tools’ which allow designers to change the value of a product or environment, fine tuning it to meet the expectations of the user and the aspirations of the client.

New languages for a new millennium

I have no doubt that design is undoubtedly an international language.

The potential to trade successfully with one another depends on our ability to recognise and understand cultural differences, ensuring we encode our products and buildings with the appropriate messages while respecting the special cultural expectations of individual societies. We must be careful to protect and nurture cultural differences because they are a fragile and valuable source of human richness and economic wealth which will diminish and vanish if they are abused.

We live in strange times when objects no longer automatically describe their use. Technology has become seamless and intangible and we must develop new languages if we are to eloquently describe new objects and communicate to users how these new objects should be used.

The best designers solve the problems today’s objects present by giving clues to suspicious users which help describe the purpose of an object. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways whilst simultaneously hinting at what tomorrow’s products might be.

Designers must empower users to understand and welcome the future through education which awakens them to what they already know and react to. Non-designers must play an active role in designing the world rather than feeling impotent and afraid of what tomorrow might hold.

Conversely, designers should not worry about being discarded and replaced by scientists and numerically based engineers. Culture is always changing and constantly needs re-calibration, revaluation and expression as new objects and processes.

Today, new organisations exist which use the familiar creative process but they do not describe themselves ‘designers’. These new organisations are developing ‘multi-dimensional tools’ for the analysis, prediction, synthesis and testing of new products prior to their introduction into the marketplace. They draw upon a mixture of methodologies from the arts and sciences. The ancient alchemy which transformed rocks and stones into magical objects throughout many cultures and many ages is at last being thoroughly investigated and understood so it’s principles can be applied to objects not yet conceived which will help us live comfortably, responsibly and profitably in a new millennium.