Everyone Knows the Words Now

Aug 14

And Why Spewing Design Terminology Can Be Meaningless

Everyone Knows the Words Now

The internet has made the vocabulary of design available to anyone with a phone and a little curiosity, and I think that’s mostly good. Information used to be the barrier. It isn’t anymore.

Fluency Isn't Vision

But knowing the word for scale doesn’t size the sofa or the ceiling height. Knowing what a sight line is doesn’t tell you how to arrange space and where windows need to happen. Knowing the words and knowing what to do with them are two different things. The second one still has to be trained and practiced.

I learned this in studio, twenty hours a week, standing in front of juries of working professionals whose job was to take my work apart. And I learned it watching brilliant people hit walls. Students who could handle every technical demand but lacked the ability to create. Students with a beautiful hand, drawings you wanted to frame, who couldn’t generate an original idea to draw. Technical skill, creative vision, craft. A great designer needs all of it. Flair is not a design principle. Neither is taste.

The Automatic Fail

One of the interesting quirks or rules which has followed me for thirty years and I can’t seem to shake: I had a studio professor with a standing policy: say the words “I like” during your presentation and you failed. Automatically. Harsh? Yes. Right? Also yes. Because nobody hires a designer for what she likes. A design either defines the program, meets its demands, and holds up against design principles, or it doesn’t. “I like it” is not a defense.

That professor is why there’s a rule in my studio today: “because I like it” isn’t an answer. Every decision has a reason, and I can give you the reason. And any designer you work with needs a reason beyond, “I like it”. Ok, you can like it, and still have it meet the program and design principles.

The Vocabulary Democratized. The Training Didn't.

Here’s what changed since I stood in front of those juries. The vocabulary got democratized. The training didn’t. And that’s true on both sides of this profession now. Homeowners arrive fluent. So do some people practicing as designers.

Which brings me to a claim I keep running into: that a design education isn’t necessary. Which I find bizarre. In what world is training and education less valuable? I also don’t understand that those same individuals claim to be “passionate” about design, and yet have no interest in actually studying it. Weird. Also, how do you dismiss a design education if you have never had the experience of it?

I guess I just twiddled my thumbs for four years, and 20 hours of studio a week solving design problems under the guidance of practicing professionals. At the conclusion of each project, they were juried by a team of other professionals-not for the thin skinned. But that is part of the process-to explain and justify your work. Worth noting, that’s an opinion. And an opinion about a design education from someone who never had one isn’t an informed opinion. It’s a guess with confidence.

I’m not saying school alone made me a designer. Experience did that. Training beside the best in the country. Iterating until the idea earned its place, taking critique and coming back better. School is what made me able to learn from all of it. It taught me to define a program before touching a plan, to defend every decision against principle, and to know when I was wrong before anything got built. That last one is expensive to learn any other way.

So if you’ve done your reading and you arrive fluent, wonderful. I mean that. Clients who speak the language ask better questions, and I want the questions. Just know what the words can do and what they can’t. They can name the problem. They can help you understand the answer.

The answer itself comes from somewhere else. The right questions first. The right room eventually.

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Everyone Knows the Words Now

You can learn what a sight line is in an afternoon. Scale, proportion, program, negative space. The internet has made the vocabulary of design available to anyone with a phone and a little curiosity, and I think that's mostly good. Information used to be the barrier. It isn't anymore.

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