Can designers and design abilities be perfectly copied?

2020-Duoxin Portable Massager

I haven't seen you for a long time, and the backstage has received a lot of reminders. Very not easy until the end of the year, busy to write something to share with everyone. Note: Some of the pictures in this article are original design works of Aji in previous years, only for appreciation :) ~ ~

A recent chat with a friend triggered a thought. Can the design be quantified by indicators? Can we quantify the color, shape, touch, light and shade, texture, etc. of each design. It's like evaluating coffee or tea. This may also lead to another question that many SME managers and Agee have discussed before, "Can designers make reasonable quantitative replication"?

Difficulties in Quantifying Indicators in Pure Visual Design

The first question can be cut from two angles. One is pure perceptual artistic design, the other is pure commercial design.
The audience of art design can be large or small. Artists can spend years or even longer to complete a work that may be "beyond their means" in the eyes of outsiders for a small audience. Because truly pure works of art are more to satisfy spiritual pursuits than economic benefits. Lonely self-appreciation is a more common behavior in the field of pure art.

In 2018, Agee designed a deer hand warmer for the "little parrot"

Pure commercial design is closer to public life. As designers, we will intentionally or unintentionally add some popular elements to the design process to "please" consumers. The essence of commercial design is for money. Then the data indicators related to money can be designed to be temporary success or failure in the current market. For example, the sales volume of the product, the favorable rate of the market, the number of awards, etc. But please note that I used the uncertain words "side, present, temporary, success or failure" instead of the absolute evaluation of "comprehensive, good or bad. Because even a rational business design must contain emotional parts. A work that you may not like in the design process ends up on the market, while it is normal for another award-winning product to sell poorly in the end. I attribute all this to the uncertainty of the perceptual part of art, or the immeasurable nature of human nature.

Opening effect of portable massage instrument storage box

Then the problem comes. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, a series of products such as "tea and coffee" will have corresponding quantitative evaluation indicators. Why is it difficult to implement in the visual-based design field?
Tracing back to the source, Agee thinks it may have something to do with the structure of the human brain. According to network data, the source of human information is 80% through vision. For the rest, Agee believes that the 15% depends on hearing, and the other senses are divided into the remaining 5%.

2019-Zen Deer Router

Not surprisingly, our mainstream world is built around "vision. The towering buildings, brightly colored snack packaging, the colorful sweater your grandmother knitted for you, etc. In contrast, no one cares too much about what a building smells like, or what the colorful sweater Grandma knitted for you tastes like.

In 2018, Agee designed a kitten hand warmer for "Little Parrot"


The five senses in the usual sense of human beings are form, sound, smell, taste, and touch, corresponding to vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Vision is the most sensitive without dispute. Even if the eagle eye can find a rabbit on the ground a few kilometers away, the eyes of mantis shrimp can see ultraviolet rays and positive light. Humans still rely on their eyes to receive most of the outside information. Receiving a huge amount of information at the same time (millions of colors, textures, light and shade, textures, morphological changes, etc. fused together to form an optical signal) means that the brain needs to make a huge amount of choices immediately, and huge choices derive huge amounts of behavior results. This leads to different judgments and feelings even in the face of the same thing. Just like the same movie, some people will think it is a masterpiece, some people think it is a peerless movie, and everyone will quarrel with each other.

Human hearing is second only to vision, and it is also a more sensitive feeling in the five senses. Therefore, music can also flourish in the human world. Music creation is also a form of design in a sense. Brush your cell phone and sit on the bus. You may not smell the leek cake in your old man's hand when he gets on the bus. But if there is a loud noise outside the window, it will definitely bring you back to mind in an instant and change the focus of the whole person's attention.

The range of sounds that different animals can hear

Even humans can't hear very low or very high frequency sounds like elephants or bats. An ordinary adult can still hear sounds in the range of about 16-20000Hz (network data). Not to mention the myriad changes when they are played in different speeds, lengths, rhythms, and combinations.
In short, the complexity of information means that they are difficult to be rationally subdivided, and the inability to subdivide means that the scoring system cannot be established and cannot be quantified by indicators.

Compared with the large amount of information that vision and hearing create for us all the time, sometimes we even ignore the existence of taste and smell at certain moments. Less information means easier segmentation. Anyone can easily use sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty, and hemp to summarize the taste of almost everything. Even if we add "soft, hard, cold, hot, smooth, rough, dry, wet" and other tastes, there are more than a dozen items in total. Divide each item into several files from weak to strong. Agee can easily put them all into a piece of A4 paper. Although according to statistics, there are about 25% "super tasteers" (network data) in the world. They or DNA are different from us, and some have more taste buds than ordinary people. But at most, taste is only a few times sharper than ordinary people (plug a piece of A4 paper). This level of subdivision is basically the limit of taste that ordinary humans can reach.

Classification of Object Taste

The same is true for the sense of smell, although most people can independently distinguish hundreds of smells at close range. However, once you stay away from the source of smell, or mix multiple smells together, most people can be deterred.
So a relatively small amount of information determines a relatively small number of options. Naturally, we can quantify the taste of most foods according to these choices.

In 2018, Agee designed the deer and piglet hand warmers (except bears) for "little parrot"

At this point, we might as well make a bold idea. Scientific statistics show that the average sense of smell of dogs is 1 million times that of human beings. Some special types of sheepdogs can reach 0.1 billion times that of humans. If you copy this setting to humans. Then sitting at the table, we should be able to distinguish the smell of the keyboard, the smell of the mouse, the smell of the mobile phone, the smell of PAD and the smell of which dishes the security guard on the first floor ate last night.

Olfactory Comparison between Human and Dog

If human society uses smell as the primary channel for information dissemination, then perhaps the writing system will not be as developed as it is now. Just like hearing assists vision, vision will assist smell. There will be N odor beacons that make up our communication system like the current 26 English letters or radicals. The number of the house on the road will be converted into a smell mark, and the guide system in the mall will become a smell guide system. We might say, "This movie smells so good"! IGN's game evaluation will also have one more item, smell score. Or, we can create "olfactory-led movies and games" and so on purely by different combinations of smells and timelines.
Of course, unless human beings undergo fundamental evolution or like "Cyberpunk 2077", everyone has a sense body. Otherwise, maybe the above assumptions will never come true.

An attempt to construct an irrational scene of clouds penetrating glass into the interior

Since the design cannot quantify the indicators. So is the evaluation of the design of "good or bad beauty and ugliness" a false proposition?
From the perspective of business rationality, the plan adopted or shot by your boss and leader may only be considered from the perspective of possible future market repercussions and business returns. As for what they call "good and bad, beauty and ugliness", it may not have much to do with art.

2019-Indoor Microenvironment × Integrated Circulation System

From the perspective of a pure designer, although we cannot quantify the design accurately, we can still delimit a rough range based on experience. The design that falls within the interval will have a high probability of being "beautiful" or "good". The high probability of designs outside the interval is "ugly" or "bad". This interval changes dynamically with different design objects and requirements. Therefore, the more capable designers are, the more accurately they can control this degree. Reduce this interval as much as possible for a hole in one.

2019-Duo Xin Portable Emergency Charging Treasure

To sum up, even in a narrow sense, we can judge the temporary success or failure of a design in the current market by the results, or judge the "good or bad beauty and ugliness" of a design work through empiricism ". In a broad sense, it is never possible to accurately quantify a design with indicators.

2017-CUBIC portable mini speaker

Finally, returning to the second question mentioned at the beginning of the article, can designers make quantitative copies? The answer is YES is also NO!
For example, if the company itself does not need too much innovation, it only needs the designer to repeat the output according to the average requirements under an existing framework. That only requires a reasonable staff training mechanism, and such designers can completely replicate the standard.

2017-Cute Animal Headset Series

If the company pursues a blockbuster in the blue sea market or the red sea market, it will break its way. That routine cultivation will be useless. Even if the company has a creative person, it is unrealistic to copy his working style and thinking logic. The reason has been mentioned above, design ability and aesthetic ability are almost inherently impossible to quantify. It is difficult to get a significant boost through acquired special training. Most of the design training courses we know are also aimed at taking exams or teaching some design techniques, such as drawing, software, etc. Therefore, under such high requirements, good designers will become non-sale goods, and one ticket is hard to find.

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