We academics love buzzwords as much as anyone. If you follow design thinking these days, one of the buzzwords du jour is “scale,” which for design thinkers means “context.” If you want to think like a designer, you need to look at the big picture. Here’s why.  

FACTS

I’ll start by saying that designers are the opposite of economists in one important area. Economists love the phrase ceterus paribus, or “all things being equal.” They invoke this phrase when they want to isolate a hypothesis from externalities, allowing them to ensure the integrity of their model and the method used to test it. While this ensures that the part of the world they’re analyzing is robustly modeled and predicted, it purposefully ignores the bigger picture. Heidegger might characterize this as an enframed view, or willfully restricting one’s perspective.

Example: A city planning department that builds light rail transit to reduce urban sprawl but only measures changes in mass transit ridership. The plan works within the enframed view, but in fact it turns out that the existence of cheap rail travel only enables people to live even further from the city core. They didn’t design for the big picture.

Designers need to take the opposite approach and be aware of the context in which the object designed will be used. Klaus Krippendorff’s take on content analysis tells us that when we put an object and it’s features in context it will help us make sense out of it’s true nature; and the results we can expect to get. This is what designers mean by scale. It’s not about how large the object is, it’s about how large your frame of reference is. In other words, to paraphrase Eliel Saarinen, designers always need to consider the next-largest scale of context when they design properly.

Example: The same city planning department takes scale (i.e. context) into account and realizes that fixed rails drive development whereas rapid bus lines adapt to development. Accordingly, they implement a flexible rapid bus alternative that does not artificially reduce the costs of living away from the city core.

Design is normative; i.e. it deals with what’s good and bad; how things ought to be. It makes judgments about what will work and what won’t work. In order to make the right judgment, you need to be working with all the facts – not just the convenient ones that are immediately at hand.

SO WHAT?

Sometimes design is messy because it lives outside our immediate frame of reference. We can’t always measure everything, but we still need to be able to account for it somehow. Just because certain facts aren’t handy, doesn’t mean we can put our head in the sand and ignore the big picture. This is why studying design is so critical.