ABSTRACT
Are you a product designer, or a designer of textiles? Do you design ceramics or interactive media? Perhaps graphics, packaging or craft objects are your thing? The design professions are traditionally defined by the physical objects that they each produce. This stems, in part at least, from many designers being ‘thing’ people rather than ‘people’ people – it is the using, conceiving, designing, making and fitting together of things that inspires, motivates and drives designers. This apparent obsession with things – with material objects – provides the spur to developing the skills and knowledge that are essential to good design practice. It has also led to some truly dreadful, irrelevant and self-indulgent design in which objects fulfil no apparent need, are difficult to use and have little appeal to anyone other than the designer. We are not stating a matter of taste here, but a matter of fact. As we will explain later in this book, most design ideas are commercial failures, and the chief reason for failure is that these ideas fail to connect meaningfully or effectively with people’s lives.
