People have no imagination. That’s why they need designers to build concrete forms they can relate to. It can be judged only when an idea is perceptible and refracted in the material. This applies to drafts in the design process itself but also to finished, published products. Then everyone (“the market”) who uses the product decides whether it is good.
Dirk Baecker wrote the beautiful sentence: “A designer is someone who can be mistrusted and whose solutions are convincing precisely when this mistrust is taken seriously. ”1 The respective solution offered by the product could always be different – this mistrust leads to us constantly comparing products with each other. Is product X as good/bad for question Y as product Z?
While the entire company is always responsible for the finished product (although, of course, it is always the fault of others), in the design process, the designer has to endure colleagues’ mistrust of their designs. This hurts because the shape is the result of the designer’s decisions. Hearing that these decisions may have included the wrong ones feels like a criticism of the person, not the design.
Experienced designers know that well-informed (hopefully) criticism (called feedback) improves things. You pool everyone’s intelligence to sharpen the problem and its solution. Distrust is, therefore, instrumental and functional. It is used to refine the form in its iterations.
The published form, in turn, transposes mistrust to the level of society. Here, it enables us to think in alternatives: We see the product and can compare it with other solutions. In addition, other forms can learn from it—for example, a bathroom faucet that spits out water simply by holding out your hands takes its function from a supermarket door that opens without contact.
The flip side of mistrust is trust. We assume that the faucet works, that we can somehow get to the water – and we usually do. However, if a tap is not working properly, it will be replaced in the medium term. “Design” makes it clear that we are dealing with something made. And that means that it can be done differently.
