Design is full of decisions. Which client? Which supplier? Which materials? What location? Whether to build or not to build? Which idea best suits the brief? Shall I challenge the brief (yes!)?
The journey through design is a process of decision making. The ability to make well-informed, ethical and insightful decisions is the mark of the professional. And so it is worth spending a bit of time thinking about how we arrive at decisions.
So let’s start here — with the question of who decides. Here are four answers.
- I decide – through some process to be unpicked, I am doing the decision-making
- Someone else decides – we are merely informed of their decision.
- A decision emerges – through a series of interactions between people, possibly without anyone necessarily knowing how, a preferred decision reveals itself.
- A decision evolves – this is the living world’s mechanism for decision-making.
You can see all of these at play in a design team.
- I might make a decision about what material to specify
- The client decides they want to reduce the budget – I am not consulted, merely informed.
- In a design team meeting, we review various options together, and through the interaction of people and ideas, a particular option wins out as the most popular.
- And I might not be aware of it, but our decision is informed by and part of a long-term evolution of design which, for example, has seen greater emphasis placed on end-of-life design.
Understanding who decides is a first step to figuring out the decision-making mechanism, where we have agency and how we can help make better decisions.