The Universal Language of Design

On the first day of Design 1, Professor Housefield spoke briefly about design having its own languages. This especially resonated with me, because it caused me to think about how the language of design transcends any spoken language in to something that is universally understood.

One of the most prominent examples in my mind of the language of design is that of symbols. Many ancient cultures, such as the Egyptians, used symbols (or hieroglyphs, as they called them) as their primary form of writing, Some languages, such as Chinese, still use these symbols to write rather than an alphabet system like most other cultures have adopted. One of the major drawbacks of an alphabet system is that the reader must understand the language it is written in to understand what the writer is trying to convey. However, no matter what country one visits, they know whether they're supposed to go through the door with the stick figure wearing the dress or the stick figure wearing pants. This is an example of effective communication through symbols.

Every day we encounter hundreds of symbols in our daily life. Many people are so accustomed to seeing them that they don't realize how often they are exposed to design's universal language. We are so accustomed to them that we don't take the time to think about them—which is exactly what the designers were after: instant and clear understanding.

Simple concepts such as male, female, food, car, or airport are fairly easily illustrated, especially since widely understood symbols are all ready in place for these concepts. However more abstract concepts are often hard to illustrate with a single symbol. This offers a unique problem to the designer. One possible solution is to use multiple symbols, but that allows for more potential misreadings and can get overly complicated very quickly. Usually the best solution is to invent a new symbol that can be readily understood by a multitude of cultures, yet is simple and easily readable at any scale. Obviously this is no easy task. However, designers have been undertaking these challenges for centuries and now is absolutely no time to stop.

As the world becomes increasingly connected, thanks to internet, availability of travel, and other new technologies, our world also become more and more reliant on symbols. Every day our culture moves to become more and more symbol-oriented. New symbols are constantly forming while existing ones continue to evolve. Fortunately that means that designers will continually be kept busy.