­Designisnotdecoration

The minute people hear the word ‘design’ they think pretty pictures, flowers, beautiful rainbow colours etc. But there is so much more to design than that. UX and Ui design in particular is far from just  ‘making the colour pop’. UX and Ui design is essentially about solving problems – looking at a particular given problem from multiple angles to get to a more logical and well thought out solution.

The difference between design and decoration

Design is more about  how things work (Steve Jobs), while Decoration in turn is more concerned about how things look.

I personally think that our role as ‘design thinking’ people should be about improving lives and adding value, as opposed to creating things for the sake of creating things.

In a world where Ai and other technologies will potentially automate many things, one of the ways in which we can give ourselves a bit of an upper hand is the ability to solve problems and add value by leveraging the capabilities of these new technologies.

Designing solutions

The problems we face in Africa can be solved by applying ‘design thinking’ that can be used by any country or organisation. In an interview with ABC-TV, famous designer Paul Rand said: “a logo is only valuable once it has been used”. I believe this can be said of design in general. Design needs to be useful in order for it to be valuable.

The minute that we shift our thinking of design from it just being a system for modelling items to look a certain way (for most people at least), and go real deep into the thinking of design, then design as a discipline will lead us into coming up with more rational, relevant results.

Facilitating change and adding value

We should see design as a vehicle to facilitate change and add value. As much as I’m a big believer that things need to look good, there is so much more to design. Design needs to work way harder than that in order to create much needed differences in people’s lives, organisations, and ultimately(crossing fingers) to the society as we know it.

by James Mokhasi