Design Rules

Deborah Berke

Principal
Deborah Berke Architect PC
New York, New York

In 1943, Charles and Ray Eames designed a leg splint for the navy that kept an injured leg stable during transport. The splint is beautiful, elegant, simple, and functional, and it solved a problem in a way that worked for everybody. One of the most important things about that object is that when you see it, you immediately know what it is. The design makes it instantly recognizable. Too often, we confuse design with marketability -- a product with a label that tries to tell us that the product is a "good" design.

The Eames splint is recognizable by its simplicity -- a three-dimensional outline of a space created by a leg. It achieves its intent and its function with no extraneous moves; it's anti-rococo. But simplicity does not mean simplistic -- something that's simplistic is made without thought.

One of the main criteria for the design of the everyday, though, is sensuality. Something that is sensual evokes a response that's not just visual or intellectual: It's suggestive. If you owned an Eames leg splint, you'd hang it on a wall because it's so beautiful. But then people would ask you if they could try it on -- to see how it feels. That's sensuality.

Deborah Berke (dba@dberke.com) has designed both homes and commercial projects, such as the ck Calvin Klein Stores worldwide. Berke is an associate professor of architectural design at Yale as well as editor of the book "Architecture of the Everyday" (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). Charles Eames (1907 to 1978) was one of the 20th century's most influential designers.

Clement Mok

Chief creative officer
Sapient Corp.
San Francisco, California

Design is not so much about the end product as it is about the process. This is especially true for design in the world of the Web, where you can't even talk about the design of an immutable, static object. Instead, you focus on sequential, ongoing activities -- a series of interactions and experiences. But more important, whether you're talking about design in real time or Net time, the days of the solo designer independently creating an artifact or an experience are gone. The world is too complex. Taking an idea to its ultimate expression requires the effort of the entire team -- a multidisciplinary effort.

And ultimately, any well-designed product or experience acknowledges the user. It's that respect for the user that makes a design great. That's true for a table, a chair, a book, a film, or a Web site.

A real-time product that exemplifies consideration for the user is Herman Miller's Aeron chair. The design process stretched over a three-year period and involved intense collaboration of the entire team of designers, engineers, suppliers, and marketers. Their collective goal: Understand the users and their expectations. That cross-disciplinary approach helped them design the right solution. When that chair came out in the 1990s, it looked like it was designed for Robocop, and it looked anything but comfortable. But concern for the user motivated every design decision -- and that allowed the team to have confidence in their creation.

Clement Mok (cmok@sapient.com) was creative director at Apple Computer before starting Clement Mok Designs in 1988. In August 1998, his company merged with Sapient Corp., an innovative e-services consultancy. The Aeron chair, created in 1995, was a breakthrough in chair design -- and reflected an awareness of the environment: The base of the chair is made of recycled aluminum; the frame is made of recycled polymer.

Burkey Belser

President and creative director
Greenfield/Belser Ltd.
Washington, DC

Design is harder than people think; it requires rigor, courage, and clear goals. Without a goal, design is just decoration. That might sound like a simple truism, but with a goal in mind the discipline of design becomes ordered. Every decision is reviewed and considered within the context of that goal.

Take, for example, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, dc. Unlike traditional monuments, the Vietnam Memorial does not celebrate war or victory. How could it? But those who commissioned the design expected to get a monument. Instead, they got a memorial to the dead. It's probably no accident that Lin's design was originally submitted for her funerary-architecture class at Yale.