Most of the American furniture we celebrate as the pinnacle of design is overbearing, over-embellished and a monument to waste and excess.
It also represents the furniture of people you probably dislike.
These high styles of furniture took hold in North America in the 18th century and persist to this day as both cult objects for collectors and as rites of passage for artisans. These are precious pieces that are auctioned, collected, reproduced and written about in exhaustive detail.
Or, to put it a slightly different way, the people who could afford this furniture also owned mega-farms, factories and (sometimes) entire towns. This is not a knock on their wealth. But it is a simple way of asking a question that rarely gets asked among amateur makers: Why would you want to imitate the taste of your boss’s boss’s boss?
“The Anarchist’s Design Book” is an exploration of furniture forms that have persisted outside of the high styles that dominate every museum exhibit, scholarly text and woodworking magazine of the last 200 years.
There are historic furniture forms out there that have been around for almost 1,000 years that don’t get written about much. They are simple to make. They have clean lines. And they can be shockingly modern.
This book explores 11 of these forms – a bed, dining tables, chairs, chests, desks, shelving – and offers a deep exploration into the two construction techniques used to make these pieces that have been forgotten, neglected or rejected.
You can build an entire houseful of furniture using these two methods – what we call “staked” and ”boarded” furniture. They are shockingly simple for the beginner. They don’t require a lot of tools. And they produce objects that have endured centuries of hard use.
But this isn’t really a book of plans. “The Anarchist’s Design Book” shows you the overarching patterns behind these 11 pieces. It gives you the road map for designing your own pieces. (Which is what we did before we had plans.)
Alberto Alessi's "Formula"
Do you use much market research to develop your products?
I use the Formula, a mathematic model that I developed at the beginning of the 1990s to decide if we should put a new prototype into production.
That sounds very scientific, very unpoetic!
The Formula was provoked by my brothers and cousins. They wanted to know why I was taking decisions what to do or not to do. Even I didn’t know. It was done here. [He touches his stomach.] So I put together all 300 projects that I had helped develop—some big successes, balanced by big fiascoes. The idea was to understand the reasons for these very unequal lives, and then predict the reaction of our customers.
I have two central parameters. [He sketches a grid.] One is called SMI. It means sensation, memory, and imagination, and tries to explore what people mean when they say, “Oh, what a beautiful object!” Beauty alone no longer expresses properly the relations of people with an object. You cannot use beauty when you describe a Starck project, for example. The second parameter is called CL, which means communication language. It measures the ability of a product to communicate something like status or values. A gold Rolex watch, for example, conveys wealth, while a Richard Sapper teakettle indicates cultural sensitivity. Each product can be scored 1 to 5 on each parameter. But we still had several products with the same scores, yet with very unequal lives. So I was obliged to add two more parameters: function and price.
Walk me through how some product would rate on this scale.
Let’s take the Philippe Starck squeezer, the Juicy Salif. In the first phase of its life, communication was very strong: a 5. On the function scale, people thought it was an innovation; only later did they discover that it wasn’t working so well! Give it a 4. Its price was about $60, for a score of 4, and its SMI, a 5, so its final score was 18. That meant it should sell about 100,000 pieces per year. A score of 12 is very risky—1,000 to 2,000 pieces. Since the Formula then was not very precise, you could be a bit wrong, and it could be a disaster. Twenty years later, in the Juicy Salif’s second phase, its SMI is the same. [He writes down a 5.] Communication is less. [He writes a 4.] In terms of function, everybody knows it doesn’t work, so that is a 2. Price is still reasonable, but we have introduced so many plastic pieces, it is not as impressive. Give it a 3. Today, it is a 14—about 50,000 units a year.
How accurate is the Formula?
If it is used on existing typologies, where Alessi has an existing product, it is very precise. If we face a new typology, where we don’t have enough experience, like watches, we have to fine-tune it. It is a delicate activity to tune. On existing Alessi typologies, it cannot fail.
What part tends to trip you up?
On the function, we know what works. Same for price. Even in communication, we understand the effect of an object. But where we can misunderstand is in SMI. I can easily be wrong, confusing my personal taste with the taste of my customers.
Do you make the final decisions about products?
Yes. But it’s very precious for me to understand the final score of the Formula. Not to manage by, but to understand the risk.
Does this formula work across cultures?
We do not see important differences among our core customers. They are not design victims, but they are surely not average customers. Their reactions are similar, both in Tokyo and Milan.
bobaguys: It might be easy to just think of us as just a cafe (albeit serving the highest quality ingredients in the world for boba) but we’re actually comprised of accomplished entrepreneurs, bakers, product designers photographers and writers! In other words, we have a lot in common with many of our customers!
Because we value transparency so much, we hope to start sharing more behind the scenes work that we do that might not be immediately obvious at first glance. Here’s our “work in progress” menu wireframe designed by our new team member Jesse based on feedback we’ve received from customers.
Māori eel traps were made by weaving flexible varieties of vine into long cylindrical forms. Because of the inverted design of the trap’s entrance, once lured inside the eel was unable to escape.
Should designers trust their instincts or the data?
By: Braden Kowitz, Google Ventures
For many tech companies, design is no longer subjective. Instead, it’s all about data. Analytics click and hum behind the scenes, measuring the effectiveness of even the tiniest design decisions. This constant data-stream plays an increasing role in determining what new products we will use, and what forms they might take. And when we think about the future of design and technology, we bump into an uncomfortable question: do human design instincts even matter anymore?
In the design world, there’s always been a dichotomy between data and instinct. Design departments — think Mad Men — were once driven by the belief that some people are gifted with an innate design sense. They glorified gut “instinct” because it was extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of designs in progress; designers had to wait until a product shipped to learn if their ideas were any good. But today’s digital products — think Facebook and Google — glorify the “data” instead; it’s now possible to measure each design element among hundreds of variations until the perfect outcome is selected.
For designers, this influx of data can be frustrating. If you thought you were hired for your good taste, you’ll quickly get discouraged in a culture where tech companies meticulously test 41 shades of blue. Imagine convincing a team to trust your gut instincts when cold hard data says you’re wrong. How do you simplify a crowded homepage when the data scientists agree it’s ugly, but tell you it signs up customers faster?
From my perspective working with over 80 product teams, data is important, but there’s no replacement for design instincts built on a foundation of experiences — including failures. As engineering and design become ever closer collaborators, the biggest challenge is to make decisions through a careful balance between data and instinct.
Instincts are made, not born
We all know that following your instincts is sometimes a bad idea. A quick look at Apple’s infamous round USB mouse or Segway’s first weeks should be enough to warn designers and business leaders alike that having too much confidence in one’s “design instincts” can be dangerous.
No designer is born knowing exactly what their customers will want, or how people will behave when faced with a novel design. Instincts are learned. And they’re best learned by paying attention to the world around us. Luckily, the human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine that develops and hones our instincts every time we’re exposed to a new design and the data about whether it worked.
Designers constantly pay attention to the world around them and notice when experiences fall short. We notice when door handles signal you should push, but require you to pull. We notice when the font on road signs change. We notice that little button on your phone that’s just a bit too hard to find while driving.
Trust me: paying this much attention to the details can get annoying. Not just for designers but for those around them, too.
Still, there’s a benefit to being so aware. Whenever designers notice something is difficult, we mentally dissect why that’s happening, what design was involved, and how a different design might solve the problem. Each time we do this, we’re slowly building our design muscles — what people commonly refer to as “instinct.”
This introspection only gets us so far. And that’s because the audience for our designs are often so different than ourselves. Users might be older, younger, bring other cultural contexts, expectations, or be different in so many other ways.
Even when designers think they are exactly like their users, there’s one sure difference: Designers are experts in using their own product, while new customers are seeing and experiencing the product for the first time. Since there’s no way to unlearn what one already knows, it’s essential to do user research and see the world through our customers’ eyes.
Watching customers use a product through user research is the absolute best way to develop design instincts and avoid mistakes. User research is really just another stream of data, one that’s qualitative and messy, but still extremely valuable.
The Goldilocks of instinct-driven and data-driven design
Strong product teams develop habits that strengthen everyone’s design instincts. One of the best habits to build is a cadence of user research every few weeks. When the whole team watches customers struggle with their designs, it’s possible for everyone — from engineer to CEO — to possess brilliant design instincts.
Just don’t let these instincts run the show. The trick is to recognize situations when teams should dig for data, and when they should let instincts shine.
Curious about customer behavior? Use data. When it comes to digital products, web and mobile analytics tell us exactly what customers do. Even if customers say they would never, ever, ever buy rainbow suspenders for their avatar, we just never know what people will do when we’re not watching. Better to trust the data and see what people actually do rather than trust what they say they’ll do.
Decisions about product quality? Use instinct. To build quality into a product, you have to pay attention to hundreds of details like crafting clear help content or moving that button 3 pixels to the left. None of these small changes individually would prove worthwhile with data. But taken together, they create an overall impression of quality — a halo effect that improves a product in many ways. So when wondering how much time to spend on the details, designers should trust their instincts.
Deciding between a small set of options? Use data. There’s nothing like an A/B test for making an incremental, tactical improvement. When trying to pick the just-right words for a homepage header, there’s little to be gained in arguing over the right copy. It’s better to test a few versions and pick the right one based on data. The key is to measure the metrics that really matter to the business longer term (such as sign ups, purchases, or user retention) instead of just measuring clicks.
Concerned with long-term impact? Use instinct. A good reputation takes years to build, but just one bad experience can destroy it. So when balancing between tactical easily measurable goals like more clicks, and long term goals like trustworthiness, it’s essential to listen carefully to your instincts. And if your instincts need a little boost, get curious: go out in the world, talk to people, and gather data.
It’s common to think of data and instincts as being opposing forces in design decisions. In reality, there’s a blurry line between the two. After all, instincts are built by observing the world around us, and those observations are just another stream of data. Statistics help us summarize and understand the hard data we collect, and instincts do the same for all the messy real-world experiences we observe. And that’s why the best products — the ones that people want to use, love to use — are built with a bit of both.
Design is a multi layered process. In my experience, there is an optimal order to how you move through the layers. The simplest version of this is to think about four layers.
I see designer after designer focus on the fourth layer without really considering the others. Working from the bottom up rather than the top down. The grid, font, colour, and aesthetic style are irrelevant if the other three layers haven’t been resolved first. Many designers say they do this, but don’t walk the walk, because sometimes it’s just more fun to draw nice pictures and bury oneself in pixels than deal with complicated business decisions and people with different opinions. That’s fine, stay in the fourth layer, but that’s art not design. You’re a digital artist, not a designer.