Eschew Obfuscation, Espouse Elucidation

This is by far one of the most interesting quotes I have come across in recent years and you’ll always find me using it often. Simply put eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation means - avoid ambiguity and adopt clarity. But the irony being that the quote itself is so verbose makes it even more interesting.

The reason for bringing up this quote is to portray how complexity is needed to be dealt with in design.

The real world is much too complex to be dealt with comprehensively.

We need to understand the ability of design in limiting the rationality unlike scientific comprehensiveness. If we compare scientific solutions with design then it can be proved that design solutions are way too complicated unlike scientific ones which are rational, defined and limited.

The idea of design culture is one that promotes an understanding of design as transcendent of particular contexts, specific disciplines or single concepts. There are so many facets that design can have that having a broader approach makes sense. A design culture needs to be broad in its scope and deep in its meaning and utility. And if that is the case, being rational can get difficult. Every culture embraces social, economic, political and personal aspects and this not only makes the real world much too complex but also talks about how designers need to be broad-minded if they need to establish a design culture. A design culture that connects to everyone in the society at the same time adapts itself to the changes in the society. Now the scope of the society that I’m talking about is difficult to define. It can be a community, a city, an entire nation or even mankind for that matter. This makes the job even harder. So there are lot of aspects that are needed to be considered.

One of the most important factors influencing the complexity of the real world is ‘change’. As said by someone, ‘In this world, nothing is permanent except change’. So you know that eventually there will always be a desire for change which is assumed to imply a need for comprehensive analysis and rational decision making, leading to a clear choice of action. But if we keep on evaluating this, such analyses will further lead to more analyses, eventually the consequences being that the decisions cannot be made rationally, at least not in the rational tradition of scientific comprehensiveness. I believe the challenge here lies in setting a boundary somewhere during the research.

As a designer with finite boundaries, restrictions or even specific requirements for that matter, you just can’t invest too much time investigating in understanding the real world. At some point of time in a design research you have to be rational.

For example, when I start developing a mobile app and interview 50 participants for user studies, I am assuming that these 50 participants will represent the chunk of my target audience. The most important thing here is participant recruitment. I will need to make sure that these individuals are different in some way or the other so that the variety of my limited sample space will make up for my limited recruiting. I know if I try to be too comprehensive, I will only utilize precious time of my research.

And that is why I started with the statement delineating that the real world is much too complex to be dealt with comprehensively. It is difficult to address every single issue but you can make sure that your design schema covers, understands and attributes the complexity. It’s time to eschew obfuscation and espouse elucidation but with an optimum level of comprehensiveness.