Designing Against Something
Why much great design does not try to achieve something, but tries to prevent something.
Designing Against Something
The power of what you do not want.
There is a way of designing that only thinks in goals. You want a chair to be comfortable. You design for comfort. You want a door to open easily. You design for ease. This is design as aspiration. It is what you want to achieve.
But there is another principle that can be much stronger. Anti-design. Not: what do I want this to become? But: what do I absolutely want to prevent?
A classic example is Donald Norman's work on User Experience. He observed that many products were bad because designers had no clear anti-goal. They had no strong picture of how the product could fail, so they did not actively design against failure. They only designed for success scenarios.
Good design resists. It says: this must not happen. A door handle is the classic example. A door can go wrong in three ways: you do not know which side should open, you hurt yourself, you open it in the wrong direction. Norman's anti-goal was: this must not happen. From there, everything follows. The shape of the handle, the feel of the pressure, the orientation, everything follows from: this must not go wrong.
This is not trivial. If you try to make something beautiful and simultaneously prevent it from failing, those are two different assignments. Many designers choose beauty and accept failure. Anti-goal design says: preventing failure is more important than beauty.
Apple is famous for this. An iPhone must not fail in unexpected ways. From there, every detail is determined. Yes, it looks good, but that is secondary. It is primary that it cannot break in ways you do not expect.
This touches something deep. Much contemporary art works in anti-goal design without naming it as such. An artwork by Ai Weiwei is not primarily designed to be beautiful. It is designed to prevent something: equalization, numbness, overlooking injustice. From there, its form flows.
What interests me is that the logic of design is reversed. Instead of: what must this achieve? You ask: what must this absolutely not do? And then: what follows?
This principle can be applied to many fields. A bridge must not collapse. From there, every detail of structure follows. A restaurant must not make guests sick. From there, everything about hygiene and ingredients follows. A school must not snuff out children's curiosity. From there, the whole pedagogy follows.
It is a principle that is simple but not easy to apply, because it requires you to think deeply about what you really do not want. Many designers do not want to explore that. They want to design positively: toward something. But the power lies in the against: against failure, against damage, against injustice.
Sources: Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (1988); product design case studies
Source: Design philosophy, Donald Norman; product design case studies