Design Thought Leader

Designers can try to experience the user’s situation as directly as he or she can, while acknowledging the limitations. But direct experience of another kind is crucial to any design—namely, direct experience with the material used or the process of making something.

Although, it’s not user-centered, I wonder if that’s not another aspect of empathy. To quote the late Saul Bass, ‘Every design problem has a craft basis.’ Describing his widely acclaimed graphic title sequence for the film The Man with the Golden Arm, Bass said, ‘If I had not myself fooled with cut paper, I would not have gotten the symbol.’ When the architect Louis Kahn told his students, ‘The brick wants to be an arch,’ I don’t believe they took him literally. They knew what he meant even if the brick did not. Designers always relate personally to the stuff they make things from. The 19th-century critic John Ruskin coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to describe the predisposition of painters and poets to attribute human qualities to inanimate objects. Designers naturally do it all the time, but in their case, it is neither pathetic nor fallacious.

Ralph Caplan
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