Dear Fil,
Yes, it's necessary to figure out who uses which criteria to evaluate design.
Not only practitioners, researchers and instructors should be surveyed. Other groups, like the ones listed below, all seem to apply different ways of judging the values of designed objects. All of these groups can tell you what 'good design' is, although it is very unlikely that there is a common set of criteria that all groups will accept.
- people who actually (have to) look at designed objects
- commissioners: people who pay for the development of designed objects
- curators of museums and archives (is it worth to acquire and store?)
- jurors of design awards (who wins?)
- editors of annual publications/yearbooks (who to include?)
- authors/journalists/editors who publish about graphic design (selection of topic and perspective).
Furthermore, all criteria are context dependent: finances, history, involved risks, ethics and legal are the first ones that come to mind, and it is likely that experience of the observer, geographical location, cultural situation and language have a role to play too.
And in addition, the people mentioned above can only evaluate objects/artefact after is has been made visible. Designers - and their advisors/ assistants/ juniors - are likely to have applied another range of criteria before the object could be seen by others.
This note should not be interpreted as 'you can't judge what good design is'. It just indicates that, before any judgement can be made, it needs to be very clear what the position of the juror is. If you look from here, it's "good design", but if you look from there it might fail on all accounts ...
Kind regards,
Karel.
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On 05 Jun 2010, at 16:19, Filippo A. Salustri wrote:
> I think it would be interesting to conduct a cross-disciplinary survey of
> practitioners, researchers, and instructors in design on what constitutes
> "good design."
> This is the kind of thing I would like to see groups by DRS or DS (or the 2
> of them collaboratively) undertake.
> Cheers.
> Fil
>
> On 5 June 2010 02:55, Mattias Arvola <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Yes, deciding what is good design is difficult. Yet, we do it all the time.
>> Otherwise we could not come to any design decisions. But it is indeed
>> context dependent and it is about value judgements. There are however some
>> regularities that always come back. I do not know what they are in graphic
>> design, but I have a fairly good idea about what they are in interaction
>> design.
>>
>> If you are interested in learning how professional interaction designers
>> reason about design quality you may want to read my upcoming DRS-paper
>> (abstract below).
>>
>>
>> // Mattias
>> --
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