Agency Design
As a designer you are creating the ability for users to complete their task, I like to think of this as ‘agency’.
Strength signifies true control of a situation. We design services that give the user agency to complete their task.
Instead of brute force, rigid conclusions, and a fixed point of view. A quiet, flexible, responsive strength works.
Meeting the users requirements your designs give them ‘agency’ to carry out the task they need to do. You are designing agency. Giving the user the chance to independently complete their task, using the service you are providing. A task is as Clayton Christensen might say the job to be done.
As the users needs evolve, the services you are designing need to evolve. Software development seems ahead of design in the language it has for describing a more open ended way of creating digital products. Software is now ‘agile’ where scope is flexible, outcomes uncertain, progress exploratory, and feedback loops drive decisions. Lean UX is a step into this language.
John Maeda has begun talking to this when he talks of computational design in an AIGA interview…
‘So if computation is the “upside-down world,” then what is design?
Well, design is a messed up premise because it was made when there was only wood, metal, glass, and our hands. Whereas the computational world is using alien materials, and in a world of alien materials, the nature of products and design should change. Products change in few main ways. The first is that incomplete becomes better than perfect. Because if it’s a malleable force, you don’t have to ship anything perfect anymore. [Computational products] are like the Terminator—you can deploy an incomplete form, and at the other end it can reform and evolve. ‘
You only have to think of ‘software as a service’, I now accept that my software that I use to design is in constant development and I need to always be installing the latest versions. As a designer this creates greater agency for me.
Agency design, design that gives the user the ability to complete their task.