Paula Rojas Blog

Asides

• Many of the terms defined in this dictionary address, directly or indirectly, the concept of value. Indeed design can be understood as being a value-adding and value-negotiating process. Value is a very basic and broad concept. It relates to the worth that we humans ascribe to anything and for almost any reason.

  If you were to think of any reason that some thing, someone, some feeling, some experience might be of some worth, importance, or significance then you have placed a value on it. Value is most commonly understood to represent the amount of money (or other “in-kind” currency) that it takes to complete an exchange to buy, to rent, to employ, and so on.

  
  The relative amount that one must exchange is the value of the thing exchanged. The precedence usually given to quantitative valuation has led to attempts to quantify the less tangible qualitative aspects related to design.

  Design credits objects with value and the success or failure of a design can be understood in large part by how much additional value design imparts to the designed artifact. Predictably, the process for determining the success or failure of a design in terms of adding value to the “base” is through evaluation. (The difference between evaluation and testing is the key to understanding the idea of value in relation to design.)

  The relative value of the things in our life is derived from a combination of how they make us feel (non-substantive assessments) and how well the artifact works in relation to the design criteria (substantive assessments). There is a greater demand on designers to be able to articulate the substantive value of design to clients and, at the same time, a growing appreciation in business circles that innovation will rarely result from strictly quantitative and efficiency-based processes.

  Consequently there is a growing awareness of other value systems for all those involved in the commissioning, manufacture, and distribution of designed objects and systems. The combination of a heavy reliance on metrics-based accounting and the increased appreciation of the importance of qualitative values for business has resulted in what is known as “triple-bottom line accounting.”

  This is an attempt to quantify on the balance sheet the social and environmental impact of a business operation and this in turn influences design decisions (see entry on Sustainability for a critique of this approach). Qualitative values are critical to design: a newly designed object that reduces waste will encourage a buyer who is concerned about the environment to assign civic value to it; if it embodies a technical innovation, the financial backer gains status value; and, if it is bought as a gift implicit with emotional understanding and intimacy, then the recipient attributes an emotional value to it.

  The designer or design team make choices at every point in the design process and most of these are value laden. Every decision at each “choice point” will give priority to certain values over others.