What is good design?

by | Feb 20, 2020 | Uncategorized

Can you relate in a few words to design thinking as far as your work?

design thinking is synonymous with good design behavior. Ummm, we as designers, I think, are inherently
planners, and that’s very much at the core of what I believe
to be good design activity.
>>Dan: So what are the characteristics of good design?
How do you see good design?
>>Josh: Good design is, at its core, as we’ve said,
serve a human-centered activity.
It’s something which starts at the needs
that we have as humans and builds out around those
needs to deliver answers to problems which are clear,
thoughtful, and engaging.
I think that if you’re thinking about the human at the center,
you’re thinking about the needs of society at the center.
You’re thinking about how we move through the banal as well
as the complex aspects of our lives
with the same motivation, which is to move humanity forward,
not backwards.
That’s what human-centered design, humanistic design means.
Designers are like farmers.
We plant seeds, but we plant seeds not just of solutions,
but also of desire.
We make things which people need but also want.
>>Dan: Tell me more about desire.
This is an interesting topic to get into,
because I think that understanding what people need
and what people want is what designers are good at,
it’s what ultimately our training enables us to do.
And that’s something beyond the sort of bean-counting
that happens in marketing, for example, right?
It’s just knowing that because of the lineage
of certain ideas, we can understand the future
of where those ideas might go.
I think that’s one of the things that design thinking kind of proposes.
>>Dan: What are the characteristics or relations
between design thinking and good design?
>>Josh: Good design is understanding that we
should be fearless with regard to testing our ideas.
We should be– and when I say fearless,
I mean engaging in the process and pushing ideas forward
furiously and failing fast and at the beginning of things,
so that we can learn from those failures
and those struggles to evolve ideas.
I think that’s part of what enables
us to function as designers and to solve problems,
is that iterative study of things.