septad of
OUTCOMES

What are the outcomes of the act of design, one may ask. The spectrum⁵⁸ of design encompasses products, messages, processes, services, systems, interactions and environments.

Perhaps the most needed and ubiquitous of designs are the shelters we inhabit: houses to live in, schools to study at, and factories to work at. But what makes a house a home? While bricks and mortar keep it in place, the warmth of relationships keeps it inhabited. Enmeshed in these relationships are artefacts we possess. Designers design things; chief amongst them are the objects that populate the world. These objects entangle us in a web of relationships, and before we know it, they turn into objects of desire, joy, delight and surprise as well as objects of fear, anger and disgust – objects that are extremely useful and utterly useless. A crucial question for the designer concerns the existence of the design – what should one design in a world full of stuff?

Designers design messages – signs to suit our times. Messages are vehicles of communication, encoding meanings that are intended to be decoded or interpreted by others. Messages are not just visual in nature but multimodal, such as gestures like pointing, frowning, shrugging shoulders in denial or gazing expressively; verbal, such as the warmth or coldness in the tonality of speech; textual, such as taglines or advertising slogans; colour-based, such as the caution sign in traffic lights; auditory, such as the sound of sirens; and textural, such as the raised dots or warning markers on pavements or roads.

In encounters with bureaucracy, such as submitting applications, one experiences the design of processes. Step by step, processes determine our actions, liberating them or more often than not, restricting them. Processes dictate manufacturing assembly lines, logistics, supply chains, distribution channels and delivery networks of the objects we design. Processes are the templates for how things should be done in the desire to achieve standardised outputs and outcomes. Processes are designed to achieve efficiency and effectiveness.⁵⁹

Services operate at the intersection of products and processes; they depend on tangibles to deliver intangibles such as time, comfort, convenience. When your bus, train or plane is always on time, when their frequency is as desired and the ride is affordable and comfortable, travelling or commuting may become pleasurable. Services create value, which in turn is personal, subjective and temporal. Services fulfil more than just functional requirements; they appeal to emotions.

Products, processes, services and messages are embedded in systems, and systems themselves can be nested in another system.⁶⁰ A system is a network of relationships between various elements that coherently interact with each other to achieve a purpose or goal. In systems, the interdependency of elements matters. A system as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. Each part has a role to play and affects the entire network, just like each organ of the body. And just like biological systems exhibit autopoiesis⁶¹ and haemostasis, systems exhibit specific characteristics such as “resilience, self-organisation, or hierarchy”.⁶² The structure of the system influences its behaviour.

This structure is really about the interactions between the elements of a system. As an act of composition, design involves the arrangement of components, which influences how these components might potentially interact with each other. An interaction is usually construed as transactional – an exchange between entities. What is exchanged? This is generally assumed to be goods or commodities and/or information. An interaction, however, is not merely a transaction. It is a complex interplay between entities that evolves over time. Interactions can flourish as well as cease to exist. They mediate and nourish our relationships with other human beings, animals, machines and even between machines themselves. Intentions determine interactions.

We inhabit environments, whether one has designed them or not and irrespective of whether the design is intentional or not. Other species – plants and animals – also inhabit these environments. In their environment, designs are adapted, modified and even improved upon. Different designs inhabit similar environments harmoniously or not.  

The ‘built’ environment that surrounds us consists of not only buildings but also various kinds of designs interacting with each other. The environments we design consist of not just habitat but also a habitus.⁶³ Thus, the environment is not just built, but emerges through these interactions.

58. read Richard Buchanan in Wicked Problems in Design Thinking (1992) for a discussion on the original tetrad or ‘four orders of design’. 
59. “Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” Read Peter Drucker in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1983).
60. An ecosystem, for example.
61. read Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980).
62. read Donella H. Meadows in Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008).
63. read Karl Maton in Habitus (Chapter 3) and Patricia Thomson in Field (Chapter 4) in Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts (2008).