Knowing Feelingly

The other week I watched a video where composer Rob Kapilow quoted Yip Harburg as having once said "words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling but a song makes you feel a thought". I reckon design has a similar ambition. When you walk through a Palladian archway or use a Philippe Starck juicer or swipe to dismiss a notification, the design helps you feel a thought (calm, playfulness, ease). Successful design creates the satisfying sensation of innate mastery, of (to paraphrase King Lear) knowing something "feelingly".

This "knowing feelingly" is a wonderful and immensely useful idea because humans suffer grievously of forgetfulness. Our minds are like sieves. Names, facts, dates, aphorisms, the sorrows of loved ones, the humanity of others, the steps of formatting an Excel spreadsheet and the principles of a virtuous life - we forget and forget and forget.

The frailty of memory is a designer's worst nightmare because she desperately needs you to learn how to use her product, yet must teach you do to so in the design alone. Sure, there are user manuals, there are tooltips and forums and Google, but the most successful products are often those which don't require anything besides themselves. Somehow we guess to switch off the radio by rotating the volume dial anti-clockwise until it clicks; we pinch to zoom, we push to walk through doors without a handle. These designs succeed because they talk directly to the senses, make use of habits and meet our expectations, without placing additional burden on our already strained, exhausted conscious minds.

From reading 'The Design of Everyday Things' by Don Norman it would seem that in design the common trick for dealing with faulty human memory is to put some of the knowledge required into the surrounding world. Of course, planting memory cues around ourselves is common practice: we make use of notes, reminders, calendars, assistants and apps of every kind. Yet design does do something more. Where most of these signals still require an engagement of our conscious mind (we need to read the text from the note on our dressing mirror that reminds us to 'be kind today' and deliberately place ourselves in that frame of mind), design knows this is ineffective. Conscious thought is effort habitually shirked. So design uses external cues that talk primarily to the subconscious mind. Icons, art, photography, music, rituals, tattoos. Removing handles from doors which can only be pushed, embedding the notion of serenity into the very shape of a building. These are things which make us feel thoughts. It's the thoughts we feel that we remember longest.

Don Norman postulates also that great design works on three levels: visceral, behavioural, reflective. The visceral level is where our senses are intimately satisfied, because the thing is pleasurable to touch, smell, hear, hold or look at. Design at the behavioural level means that it makes good use of our existing habits (meaning skills) and expectations (meaning experience) so we can master it without extensive premeditation (meaning in flow, as satisfying and intuitive as playing an instrument or riding a bike). The reflective level is where we find the product embodies our values: an electric car with a low emissions footprint or a responsibly sourced piece of furniture.

I think these levels - visceral, behavioural, reflective - go from least to most forgetful. Advertising needs constantly to remind us that something is fair trade or organic or for a good cause, but the smell and taste and touch and look of a product are inherent. The more meaning can be communicated in the first two levels, the more immediate and longer lasting its understanding.

Furthermore, it occurs to me that the visceral, besides being more immediate and harder to forget, has yet another quality: it regenerates. By this I mean that although we become desensitised to physical sensations in the short term, going away for any length of time makes the sensations once more as fresh as ever. We might tire of feeling proud of our low-emissions cars or responsibly sourced bedsteads, but we can never tire of beauty, flavour, scent or sound. No matter how much sunshine we experience, we will always want more. Perhaps this is why art, as Proust will have it, helps us discern with new eyes: it is the visceral component that reminds us to perceive anew.

So we forget, but forget slower and tire less of those things which we get to know feelingly. Design, like art, embeds this knowledge in the surrounding world whence it may be readily retrieved any time we need to find our way reliably back to an important idea. And the most lasting representations are those which at once seduce the senses, engage habits and expectations and stir reflection in the conscious mind. So instead of that inspirational quote on the dressing mirror, perhaps we should instead surround ourselves with embodiments of thoughts - through art, design and certain other people.