The Value of Design

It all started with William Morris, a socialist with the notion that beauty wasn't just the right of those who could afford to pay craftsmen to produce it for them, but was also the privilege of ordinary men and women in average homes. This thought gave rise to the Arts and Crafts movement and the explosive emergence of design in every aspect of Victorian daily life.

His idea was that things which were produced in a factory could be designed equally as well as individual 'craft' works and this led to the first commercially produced fabrics, wallpaper and furnishing. Morris also realized that the value of design went beyond decoration into functionality and this idea was the foundation of the modern post-industrial design movement. Today we are surrounded by mass-produced design in every aspect of our daily lives, from furniture, fabrics, household products and appliances, to cars, clothes, the mass media and almost every facet of living you care to mention.

Every design has a meaning that goes beyond pure decoration. Design tell stories and communicate with those who interact with them. This is equally true of product, graphic, fashion, environmental and media design. A Tag watch is about performance, the Nike logo about winning, an LV bag about luxury, Haach studio about relaxation and MTV about youth and energy. We live in a world of sound bites, so stories these days have to be short and to the point or they simply get lost in the background noise. This is a good metaphor for the challenge facing contemporary design.

Simplicity has always been effective in communication and design. The Shell logo, Coca Cola bottle and Porsche 911 are all icons of effective simplicity. They are powerful mnemonic designs, which are quickly identified and lodge easily in the visual memory that occupies over half our brain capacity. However this recognition is only powerful because of the stories they represent and the social, cultural and historic spaces they occupy. No design can exist without this context and designers cannot design effectively without understanding the context and objectives of a design. This is why design is a sophisticated, complex and intellectually demanding discipline. It is more multi-deimensional as a thinking process than the law, engineering or accountancy - and incidentally adds more value to businesses than any of these. What then is the true value of design?

Much contemporary design seems to have lost this focus on simplicity of message and in many ways the emergence of modern technology has fostered this. Computers are easy to use programmes mean that anyone can play at being a designer and the craft skills that used to differentiate qualified designers have largely disappeared. Anyone can switch on a computer and pick up a mouse to produce a design that is colourful, neat and clean, with type that is lined up and as many drop shadows, graduations and wizzy effects as you can imagine. This has devalued the role of the designer in the minds of many clients and the world is now full of amateur art directors who all want to have a share of the designer's pie. It has also resulted in much contemporary design being over complicated, confusing and uncommunicative. The approach seems to be 'he who shouts loudest gets the share of the voice'.

This syndrome comes mainly from a lack of understanding of the design process and the role of design in the cultural and business framework. An understanding of the thinking process is what differentiates designers from those who pretend to practise design or see design as an 'add on' for their product or service. As Morris said, design is about more than just decoration, it is driven by functionality and the context in which it is created.

It is almost impossible to value design in quantifiable terms. Design is not just about outcomes, it's equally about the design process, which influences many other factors in a business or organisation beyond the product or communication. Often it is difficult or impossible to extract the value of the design from the product it is intrinsically part of, but there are iconic examples of the value of design. Alessi produces many products in its range, some sell thousands and other hundreds of thousands. The main difference between them is the design and it's meaning to those who choose to buy the product.