What Is Design?

Talking about design in a development context really cuts to the core of the definition of design itself. If this is widely considered one of the best designs ever, where does something like this fit in? On one hand, the iPhone is elegant, deceivingly complex (i.e. user-friendly), expensive - no doubt all traditional signs of good design. The Q-Drum is crude, exceedingly simple, and bargain-bin cheap. The iPhone masks unimaginable complexity with a nice package. The Q-Drum is simple to an extreme. How do you begin to compare these two?

While the former is the poster child of developed world design, the latter is an icon of sorts of the new way of thinking about design. If you want to lift people out of poverty or make life easier at the bottom of the pyramid, give your end user a look at your product and he had better smack himself in the head and say, "Wow I need that!" or you will get zero adoption at any greater-than-zero price point and probably limited adoption by charity. The Q-Drum is brilliant because upon first glance, you immediately know what its for and how many lives it will save. Yet, it is essentially just a piece of plastic.

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%."

-Paul Polak, IDE

Polak's quote is taken from his fantastic essay in the Design for the Other 90% exhibition catalog. We need to redesign how we think about design. Simple, affordable, appropriate solutions are becoming trendy, even if they end up with the aesthetics of a freshman year engineering project. And yet, all the same principles apply: make it simple, make it cheap, make it easy to understand. But all of these need to be taken to the extreme. Design for development is design on steroids.