Designer Toilet Paper?  Yes, designer toilets as well. This is how most of the world understands what a designer does – by the things they create. The assumption is that designers use their aesthetic gifts to shape the surfaces of things to magically imbue them with style and taste. These assertions are just as ridiculous and demeaning as attributing the success of African-Americans in professional athletics to natural gifts. By focusing attention solely on the end results, the value of the accomplishment is reduced to heredity.

The success of an athlete is the result of developed skills, dedication, preparation and sacrifice to the competitive and demanding world of professional athletics. A natural gift of height does not make for an NBA All-Star, nor does having golfers as parents determine the next world-class player. The logic is specious.

Talent and natural propensities are not a pass in any field. Assuming designers are successful because of the preponderance of a creative “gene” negates the skills and expertise developed over time after years of experience.

Seeing designers as builders of a process and not just products helps to understand how they do what they do. Consider this: The reason for going on a vacation is more important than the destination. Wanting great photographs of a family reunion is why you buy a great camera. If the meal doesn’t taste good, the quality of the china won’t help. Appreciating what needs to happen, to whom, and articulating what the desired results are starts to build a process that can achieve a specific outcome. This is design as a process.

As a process, design establishes a method for identifying those parameters needed to achieve success. Accomplishing that success has less to do with products being creative then the ability of those products to produce the desired benefit for their intended audience.

If the parameters used to guide the decision making process are derived at by an aesthetic judgement, personal style or current fashion, the result could be attractive, even cool, but for all practical purposes be a waste of time, money and materials. Products produced using the design as a process philosophy as well as incorporating those aesthetic elements that connect human beings with one another will accomplish their defined task and perform like magic.

The Essex Two website www.sx2.com has case studies that demonstrate how our process has helped our clients connect with their customers in ways that produce results.

Worth your time:  Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank by Robert W. Fuller. Fuller takes the analysis of discrimination beyond racism and sexism to reveal a form of injustice that everyone knows, but no one sees: discrimination based on rank, or “rankism.” Low rank – signifying weakness, vulnerability, and the absence of power – marks people for abuse in much the same way that race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation have long done. Fuller’s book provides an opportunity to change our perspective not only to benefit others but ourselves as well.