The Value of Value, or The Importance Of Empathy in Designing Purposefully (P.2 of The Design Language Series)
By: Luiz Otávio Moreira Abreu
Tags: Design, Design Semantics, Design Language, Industrial Design, Brand Strategy

On the first part of the series we dipped our toes in the pool of design language, where I tried to emphasise why it is important to understanding the why of our design choices when deciding how to put another product on this planet. As mentioned in the intro to this series, the way to the user’s heart is to tailor the meanings we wish them to get from the artefacts we are designing, and the way to do so is, well, translation… To be able to empathise with the final user, we must first understand what role the values plays in our brain.

The way we perceive the world is connected deeply to the symbolism embedded in all that surrounds us, from the people we are more attached to, to the objects we bond with. The meanings attributed to everything is deeply rooted to the way our brain evolved, from an instinct response to a reflective one. In the book ‘Emotional Design’ (in case you haven’t read it, do it, it’s a fantastic source!) Donald Norman depicts the attachment we create with objects thanks to the way we perceive them, and how this perception overlaps with the way our brain evolved, from a gut feeling decision making, to understanding the way things are used, to the way the things makes us feel. This emotional connection is vital due to the fact that we, as humans, understand better, use better, and therefore live better with objects that we create a connection with, and that’s where values come in play.

In all of these three phases (that we are going to see more in-depth further on in the series) our brain is receiving inputs from the four elements of design language: aesthetics, technology, usage and material, and through association it’s creating connections with the repertory in our limbic (primitive) brain. Even unconsciously, the brain is combining elements from the pillars with sensations, feelings, memories and souvenirs from our lives, and from a further unconscious past.

Let’s take food as an example (as you can see, it is a recurrent theme in my examples…). Smell and taste can take you far in memories of someone’s cooking, like a pecan pie you eat in the south of France that reminds you of a birthday cake your grandmother made when you were five, for example. Or we can go further and associate the taste of sweet with a rare treat to our ancestors, and therefore associate it with an arduous gained reward! What lies beneath the surface of these examples are associations to words that are at the core of what is being felt when experiencing these emotional events. Words like caring, comfort, love, warmth, preciousness can be associated to the experience of having a pecan pie in Marseille. This word association is what we could call value translation or experience semantics, the important act of naming the feelings/emotions connected to such experience, giving a whole new meaning to the act of eating a pie. And the same can be said about bad experiences — when it comes to food in particular there is a bunch of them, and for each person usually is different!

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez. Unsplash.

We tend to associate the value to our experiences, especially memories, but not so often to the products we use or the people we encounter. The importance of understanding the values that surrounds everything around us lies in the fact that, without them, we are powerless when creating something that has the potential of being meaningful (literally, full of meaning) to someone else. If we wish to embed our creations with meaning, we must understand which values are relevant to the people we are creating for, and, with them in hand, carefully (in the sense of ‘full of care’) place them in the artefacts.

Because the deep understanding of the meaning of things, what they represent to each individual, what are the experiences that linger with us is, at the end of the day, what sets apart the ‘special artefacts’ from the ‘average ones’. Only through achieving this depth we are able to set our creations apart and take them to another level.

Values are what drives connections to all that surrounds human life, and if we wish to make a difference in the lives of the people we design for, value translation and understanding is the name of the game, and design language creation is the tangibility we have at hand as the tool for such translation.