The Designer’s Paradox states that:
You don’t know what you want until you know what you can have
Ed McCann, Think Up (1)
This isn’t a criticism of clients. It’s a structural feature of design.
Design versus Shopping
If you know exactly what you want at the start of a design process then you are not designing — you are shopping.
Design begins when we have an existing situation and want to figure out how to make it better. If we already know how to do it then it isn’t design. It is precisely because we don’t know the best way to do it that we design.
A shopping list can be fully known before you leave for the shops. A design brief can’t be fully known until you begin to design.
An initial design brief is not a contract. It is a provisional intention: it describes how we want the world to be.
Why the brief evolves
Desire is strongly related to what we think is possible. It is hard to want what we can’t imagine. And we can’t imagine without playing with what is possible.
Design generates possibilities. Possibilities generate new ideas. Our expanded awareness of what is possible can change what we desire. Hence the paradox.
The Designer’s Paradox holds in complicated systems, where the design process reveals alternatives we might not have thought of.
But the Paradox becomes even more potent in complex systems, in which cause-and-effect relationships are not knowable. In such situations we need to experiment to find out what might happen, and in doing so we can change the character of the system itself.
In either case, possibilities emerge through exploration. And what’s desirable changes.
The common mistake
If we expect a brief to be fixed then we might experience change as failure or frustration:
‘The client keeps changing their mind’
‘There is scope creep’
‘The goal posts keep shifting’
Of course, this could be due to bad project management or a lack of clear direction. But often it is the Design Paradox at play.
If nothing changes in the brief, you could well ask whether it has been a good design process.
Working with the Design Paradox
Designers must work iteratively to resolve the paradox, moving through cycles of experimenting with what is possible and what is desirable until we converge on an answer.
The role of the designer is not to defend the original brief: it is to work with the client to find the best brief. The final answer won’t necessarily look like what we imagined at the start.
References
(1) Ed McCann – See Think Up (2018). Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers (Online) – Notes and resources. Available here [Accessed January 2021]