The great Colin Chapman -- founder and designer of Lotus sports cars -- was once wrestling with a design problem: he had the world's most beautiful car on his drawing board, "a racing car for the road" he called it, yet early testing had indicated the roof needed to be raised 1 1/2 inches to fully accommodate most drivers. "I'm not doing that," Chapman famously shouted, "that's a bloody compromise!"
I had a similar discussion with some clients recently, listening to them bewail their need to compromise their dreams for their house because of their small site. "But we don't want to bloody compromise," they said.
It's said that all designers need to learn to compromise: sometimes dimensionally, like Chapman; often aesthetically -- if, say, your two favourite colours won't go together on the same page; frequently functionally -- when you wind up with your kitchen, with all its plumbing, near the plumbing (and smells!) of your bathroom; and almost always financially, when the client's champagne tastes won't come anywhere near their beer budget.
It's said that all designers need to learn to compromise: sometimes dimensionally, like Chapman; often aesthetically -- if, say, your two favourite colours won't go together on the same page; frequently functionally -- when you wind up with your kitchen, with all its plumbing, near the plumbing (and smells!) of your bathroom; and almost always financially, when the client's champagne tastes won't come anywhere near their beer budget.
But is compromise really the right word for what designers really need to do when weighing up all the myriad factors that influence a design?
Spoiler alert: No, it's not.
It's not even the right way to think about it.
A compromise is "an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions" -- a process beginning in conflict, and usually leaving all conflicting parties unhappy when they finally leave the table.
A compromise is "an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions" -- a process beginning in conflict, and usually leaving all conflicting parties unhappy when they finally leave the table.
What a designer needs to learn to do is not to compromise, but to harmonise. Two ways to help a designer harmonise the competing claims of any design involves two concepts coming from outside the field of design: a notion from economics called marginal utility, and something from philosophy called teleological measurement.
Let me explain the last one first.
Teleological measurement simply means measurement with a purpose, measurement that is "performed in and against an enormous context: it consists of establishing the relationship of a given choice to all the other possible choices and to one's hierarchy of values."
We do this all the time in the real world. The simple fact in any real-world situation is that doing one thing always precludes doing another. If I go out to a party on a Saturday night I can't also stay home and study. If I use my truckload of wood to burn during winter for heat, I can't also use it to build my house. If I spend my last few dollars on beer I can't also spend it on the bus home. What we do decide what we do in each of these cases reveals our own ultimate standard behind decisions like these, and our own hierarchy of values that informs these choices. Even subconsciously.
Every designer must do the same, establishing a clear brief for their design and, in many cases, testing the design over several iterations in order to discover the ultimate value of that which she is designing, -- and also all the several lesser values that contribute towards these ultimate values, and how precisely all these values are ranked.
Teleological measurement deals, not with cardinal, but with ordinal numbers—and the standard serves to establish a graded relationship of means to end... This requires that [an individual] define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly. Thus all his actions have to be guided by a process of teleological measurement.
In any project, it may take some time and many iterations to uncover these things (this is after all one of the key aims of every period of concept design) but ranking in order of their importance the values associated with a design project is (or should be) a key part of every design process.
Ranking them properly means that the final design need not be a compromise, but instead comes as a result of weighing up these values according to their place in our hierarchy.
Sounds great, you say. But just how the hell do we do that?
That's where the economists' idea of marginal utility comes in.
The theory of marginal utility begins with this recognition that the values of each good are best ranked in order of their importance to the acting individual, the ranking providing a basis for these values to be harmonised:
Discovering this sort values scale in each of our design projects allows us to avoid compromise, and instead to harmonise our project's values based on each unit of the finite means available -- trade-offs between goods happening "at the margins."
The recent discussion with my clients offers a good example of how we might do this.
My clients have a small site. Simplifying things enormously for the sake of illustration, they like lawn. And they want five bedrooms. How does marginal utility theory harmonise these apparently competing wants? Simple: by testing each unit of these goods against their position in the clients' values scale.
Thus, our quick discussion reveals that on this site and for these clients that the fourth bedroom is probably "the marginal bedroom" -- and they now have a framework within which to go home and think through whether that's truly the case.
The framework of marginal utility has allowed the clients to easily determine for themselves the likely number of bedrooms in their future house, and I will soon have a much clearer brief that better harmonises their wants with their site.
In a very simplified way, this is what I try to do in every briefing meeting. And it is what every period of concept design with every client tries to uncover.
Furthermore, it is precisely what every good designer does every single day, either consciously or subconsciously, when it looks like they're just pushing around lines on a page: they are seeking a way to bring together all the apparent conflicting values of a design into one harmonious whole. This framework of marginal utility allows the designer a way to think about that process explicitly, and to talk it through with their clients.
I often liken the design process as being, first, to uncover all the elements and inputs important to a design, and then to throw all these balls up in the air to see where and how they land. (And then doing that all over when we discover the need for a new ball.) That's essentially what happens when applying these two notions of teleological measurement and marginal utility in design. The first essentially gives us the relative size of our balls. The second explains how the balls bounce off each other to best effect.
Together they offer a designer a way out of any bloody compromise, and towards a more harmonious outcome.
Colin Chapman and his car's stylist produced one of the era's most beautiful cars, but there was never very much room inside and in the end only 1,000 of the cars were made, and on every one they lost money. Lotus however went on to take the hard lessons learned in producing the Elite and apply them to the Elan, which did make money -- and went on to become one of the most successful small sports cars of all time (a model of design that still survives today in the watered-down example that is the MX5).
We can only speculate how different things may have been if the great man had learned about marginal utility at an early age?
All action involves the employment of [finite] means to attain the most valued ends. Man has the choice of using the [finite] means for various alternative ends, and the ends that he chooses are the ones he values most highly. The less urgent wants are those that remain unsatisfied. Actors can be interpreted as ranking their ends along a scale of values, or scale of preferences. These scales differ for each person, both in their content and in their orders of preference. Furthermore, they differ for the same individual at different times.Marginal valuation recognises that humans value goods according to our ends -- to be precise, according to the individual units of those goods, and each of these units themselves fits into our values scale. (We value our afternoon's first ice-cream cone more than our first coffee, our first coffee ahead of our second cone, our first beer ahead of our second coffee...)
The choice of which ends to include in the actor's value scale and the assignment of rank to the various ends constitute the process of value judgment. Each time the actor ranks and chooses between various ends, he is making a judgment of their value to him.
Discovering this sort values scale in each of our design projects allows us to avoid compromise, and instead to harmonise our project's values based on each unit of the finite means available -- trade-offs between goods happening "at the margins."
The recent discussion with my clients offers a good example of how we might do this.
My clients have a small site. Simplifying things enormously for the sake of illustration, they like lawn. And they want five bedrooms. How does marginal utility theory harmonise these apparently competing wants? Simple: by testing each unit of these goods against their position in the clients' values scale.
- The house's first bedroom (their master bedroom), is clearly more important than any patch of lawn.
- The house's second bedroom and third bedrooms are still more important to them than any amount of lawn. (And on a tiny site, might preclude any lawn at all -- hence, they would be living in an apartment.)
- The house's fourth bedroom is probably more important to them than that same area of lawn (although on that one, they are still deciding).
- The house's fifth bedroom, they decided (when put to them this way) is definitely less important to them than that same area of lawn.
Thus, our quick discussion reveals that on this site and for these clients that the fourth bedroom is probably "the marginal bedroom" -- and they now have a framework within which to go home and think through whether that's truly the case.
The framework of marginal utility has allowed the clients to easily determine for themselves the likely number of bedrooms in their future house, and I will soon have a much clearer brief that better harmonises their wants with their site.
In a very simplified way, this is what I try to do in every briefing meeting. And it is what every period of concept design with every client tries to uncover.
Furthermore, it is precisely what every good designer does every single day, either consciously or subconsciously, when it looks like they're just pushing around lines on a page: they are seeking a way to bring together all the apparent conflicting values of a design into one harmonious whole. This framework of marginal utility allows the designer a way to think about that process explicitly, and to talk it through with their clients.
I often liken the design process as being, first, to uncover all the elements and inputs important to a design, and then to throw all these balls up in the air to see where and how they land. (And then doing that all over when we discover the need for a new ball.) That's essentially what happens when applying these two notions of teleological measurement and marginal utility in design. The first essentially gives us the relative size of our balls. The second explains how the balls bounce off each other to best effect.
Together they offer a designer a way out of any bloody compromise, and towards a more harmonious outcome.
Colin Chapman and his car's stylist produced one of the era's most beautiful cars, but there was never very much room inside and in the end only 1,000 of the cars were made, and on every one they lost money. Lotus however went on to take the hard lessons learned in producing the Elite and apply them to the Elan, which did make money -- and went on to become one of the most successful small sports cars of all time (a model of design that still survives today in the watered-down example that is the MX5).
We can only speculate how different things may have been if the great man had learned about marginal utility at an early age?
5 comments:
Clarifying, and a tremendous help in thinking through the issues -- and (as I'm sure you already know) applicable very widely.
Thanks!
You're very welcome, sir. :-)
An intersecting and valuable perspective on what ‘marginal utility’ is all about. I agree the term ‘compromise’ often has the meaning you ascribe to it, but often it doesn’t. For instance it’s said that marriage is about compromise. An example might be that one person likes a very tidy house, but the other doesn’t care as much; and both have to adjust their expectations from what they’d have if living alone to something moderately tidy. Most people, and probably myself too would say that’s an example of compromise. But underlying that is the fact that they value each other’s company more than their ideal living environment for one party, and the extra work for the other. So in that sense both are still maximising their marginal utility. Does that mean they ‘compromise’ in this sense is just a synonym for maximum marginal utility between two parties? Is it perhaps that just like the word ‘selfishness’, ‘compromise’ is too loosely defined a concept in common parlance, often conflating two quite different concepts?
I think you're partly right here. Also true, I think, is that the 'boundaries' set by each partner's marginal utility (or, even more networked, the marginal utility of all a family's members) are also analogous to the boundaries determined by the framework of *rights*: my freedom ending where your nose begins setting up those frameworks of moral space whose dimensions are determined by those boundaries.
Boundaries both dynamic, and reflexive.
Not sure I agree with you however about the word compromise: I think calling it compromise instead of, say, harmonisation is generally somewhat destructive to design, and I suspect to marriage as well. It leads, which I've seen in design, to the idea that the needs or likes of one partner (for example) should be ignored, or downplayed, because that's what compromise is all about -- or, worse, that both partners' needs or likes should be somehow water down in the interests of the project.
Couldn't think of much more destructive to either a marriage or a house, when that happens!
In design you have competing values, and I accept the ideal is a harmonisation where the maximum marginal utility is achieved by integrating those values the best. I appreciate in that context it’s somewhat flawed to call it a compromise - because it implies having to give up something that’s possible - but in reality having your cake and being able to eat it too are not possible. The best possible solution is one that maximises marginal utility, so how could the best solution possible be a ‘compromise’?
The same idea can be applied to marriage (or any other partnership between two or more people), but it’s more complex, as we are dealing with different people with different priorities and values. Of course if the relationship is not win-win and the needs of both parties aren’t being met, it will be destructive. In marriage that requires an element of freedom in being able to go and do your own thing at times, or having your own space in the house (the boundaries you refer to). But there will be things you have to do together, or communal spaces you need to share. All I’m saying is that in those cases each party can’t get 100% of what they want, and that’s usually said to be a compromise (but only on those specific activities or spaces). If the value you’re getting from your partner in other ways exceeds what you’re losing elsewhere, you still have maximum marginal utility.
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