PRINCIPLE FIVE:
Good design makes life a little easier
The best design doesn't ask for attention. It quietly removes obstacles
so people can focus on what they came to do.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making the unfamiliar familiar
Sometimes clarity means answering the question people
haven't quite figured out how to ask yet.
When Yale's student center was being renovated, University
events got scattered temporarily across campus. A converted parking garage on
York Street became a new venue for student organizations and events, but it
wasn't part of Yale's mental map yet. Nobody knew it was there. The obvious
move would've been to promote the location. I decided to promote the
possibility instead.
Instead of spending the whole campaign explaining where Yale
on York was, we showed people what they could actually do there: dance, dine,
play, teach, perform, gather. The creative stayed deliberately simple. Dance on
York. Dine on York. Play on York. The goal was to make the unfamiliar feel
familiar fast. The imagery showed the space through the eyes of the people who
might actually use it, so there was an immediate link between the venue and
what they were already looking for. Instead of asking students and campus
groups to figure out what this new place could become, we just showed them.
We can do this here. That was the real message underneath it
all.
The campaign worked well enough that the University
President kept using the concept for other campus communications. More than
that, the space stopped feeling like a temporary fix and started feeling like
an untapped Yale resource that had somehow been hiding in plain sight the whole
time. That experience reinforced something I believe about design: good design
doesn't make people work to understand it. It gets out of the way, makes the
answer obvious, and lets people get on with what they actually came to do.
What this taught me...
Before asking what something should look like, ask what people need to understand.
Don't explain what people can experience.
The best design removes a question.
