Design Values

“A commodity appears at first site, a very trivial thing,” Karl Marx.

Karl Marx in Lego

Values are very general ideas that individuals and groups hold on to and use to guide decisions. There are personal values that may be specific to one individual as well as shared collective values like economic values, religious values, gender values, etc. A designer must negotiate between his or her own values, the values of a client and the values of the consumer in society at large. The values are then invested into the design and ultimately expressed by the design.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) author of " The Fetishism of Commodities," was the German philosopher responsible for the two prominent economic theories, Capitalism and Communism. In Das Kaptial (1867) he proposed that the exchange of products relies on social relationships. Whenever we trade, we are exchanging our values. He suggested that all commodities have an obvious use value and a less obvious mystical value. The exchange itself is not determined not by quantity, but by the mystical value.

Marx’s example is that two ounces of gold could be traded for one ton of iron, not by basis of size but because the mystical value of gold as something rare and lustrous is greater than the mystical value of iron.

Contemporary author John Heskett described the value of things in the essay "Utility and Significance." Utility is function and efficiency while significance is the meaning that the object has to users, acquired through habits or rituals.

Utility is global, significance is local!

While utility can cross cultures, significance varies from culture to culture. The design object then can serve a similar use but not retain meaning, especially with communication design of packaging. The communications of global companies are re-designed to customize the meaning for the culture. Significance can also vary person to person. The values expressed by designers, such as beauty, are not always the values that are appreciated by users. Sometimes users can value an object more than a designer intended. French thinker Jean Baudrillard used the term “impossible exchange” to describe the limit of capitalism which occurs when someone such a great personal value for an object that it is withheld from the market.

John Chris Jones is author of the essay "What is Designing?" Until the 1950’s and 60’s, design was something used by architects and engineers. It was advance planning on paper through the use of certain reliable principles. Even until the 1960’s there was a debate about what design was. Jones suggests that designing is simply to “initiate change in man-made things.” This is a process that involves a set of decisions. Each decision creates effects and it is the role of the designer to determine good or bad effects of the design.

Lila Jang, 2009

The fundamental design problem is instability. Designers are creating something for the future and are simply making predictions about effects. Circumstances can change causing the design to become obsolete in ways a designer may have never predicted. Values and meaning may be clear but the if the situation dramatically changes a design can become useless.