Usefulness and Design

A designed thing should be useful; a useful thing doesn’t have to have been designed.

This may sound like a contrived truism. Yet, by examining how design relates to usefulness, we can understand its impact more clearly.

Let us define a few foundational ideas here. Things, in this case, refers to the things we make. Our proclivities that make us Homo Faber¹; our propensity to make things that we can use, and to be shaped by said things as well. This definition transcends the physical realm–they can refer to ideas, software and even abstract systems². Design here refers to the deliberation in making, or in my own formal definition, the deliberate arrangement of materials with concerns over time in order to achieve a desired outcome for people involved.

The definition of usefulness used here supersedes its pragmatic and utilitarian notion–that is, useful only because it creates a tangible positive outcome–and incorporates the postmodern lens of values and judgements. A thing is useful because humans use it. It can be useful because it enables us to do more things (e.g., hammers), because it helps us organize activity (e.g., processes), appeals to our sense of aesthetics (e.g., ornaments), or useful because it social signals. As designers, these are all usefulness insofar as they meet the users’ needs.

Undesigned Usefulness

Usefulness does not require a thing to be designed. As a rudimentary example, tree stumps can be useful as seats. A taller stump can serve as a table. These may not be great pieces of furniture but they are intuitively useful to us and serves as a baseline measure of seating utility. Historically, humans have been very good at finding purpose in things and repurposing things to serve needs in our daily lives.

However, when it comes to human made, artificial³ things, the boundaries become less clear. I argue that everything that is made has, by necessity, been designed. The challenge henceforth lies in understanding what is it designed for and how usefulness manifests from the design.

At the risk of simplification, consider the invention of the internet. By all accounts, the rise of the World Wide Web grossly exceeded the expectations of its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, which originally intended the system to be a tool to help CERN researchers organize and share documents within the organization. If you squint, the internet today still contains traces of the original vision, with wikipedia being the quintessential example, alongside with social media, videos, commerce, and everything other human activity under the sun. One could say that the internet today is a conglomeration of ideas, designs, that evolved from and stacked on top of the original idea of exchanging information within a network.

This example may give us a hint of what usefulness means. A thing has designed usefulness if it fulfills the promise of its original design. A thing has emergent usefulness if it turns out that it solves a problem adjacent to the original design. A thing may even be accidentally useful if it solves an unrelated problem.

Usefulness is not a static quality but one that evolves with human effort. The internet was designed for research. It then also proved useful for information other than research. Subsequently, when there was too much information, the search engine was designed to help users navigate it. Then e-commerce, and so on and so forth.

Design as a Tool for Manipulating Usefulness

Design is the human effort that changes the usefulness of things. To quote Herbert Simon, “Natural Sciences is what is, Design Science is what it could be”. In an almost circular definition, design (science) is the thing that we came up with so we can make things new and differently useful.

In contemporary design practice, we are drilled to first understand who is it for, and then we work to find a solution that satisfices⁴ all the requirements and constraints that we uncover. Very often, the outcome here–the designed usefulness–is a result of narrowing the scope of inquiry and better fitting the designed thing into the environment in which it is to be used.

Consider email, a longstanding staple of workplace communication. Originally developed as a digital replacement for traditional mail, even email itself has evolved in features and functionality as workplace needs changed. Yet, as workplace priorities shifted towards rapid collaboration and responsiveness, email’s limitations became increasingly apparent. Recognizing this mismatch, companies like Slack were able to design a solution that quickly took over large swaths of email workflows.

Even in this case, you will find people arguing that what Slack was doing wasn’t novel, that they were merely repurposing group chat ergonomics into a corporate environment. It is herein where design is most potent. It is the act of recognizing the mismatch and reconfiguring existing technologies to fit the situation which not just replaced but expanded what workplace communication is capable of.

While scope narrowing is common, it doesn’t always have to be the case. In fact, one can take an existing object and aspire to broaden it a larger audience. The designers of the Aeron Chair wanted their ergonomic chair to fit bodies from the first to the 99th percentile and designed a chair with different sizes and configurations⁵.

Usefulness is not synonymous with features. In fact, oftentimes features are exponentially correlated with complexity which means a higher learning curve. Drawing on Thomas Sowell insight that “there are no solutions, only trade offs”, design is about selecting the set of trade offs that best satisfices. By doing design over time, we hope that design contributes to an ever-evolving and expanding repertoire of designed usefulness in the world.

Designed Usefulness in AI

I want to briefly address AI, as it was the impetus behind my exploration of usefulness. AI is often described as a general purpose technology—a technology applicable across many domains—which prompted me to consider deeply how design shapes and clarifies the usefulness of such versatile innovations.

It may be instructive to examine the surge in AI circa 2022. A few things stuck out to me. First, prior to ChatGPT, transformer-based large language models (LLMs) were an interesting technology that appealed to a niche audience. There were useful applications, notably in autocomplete, but it was minute compared to what came after the ChatGPT moment.

ChatGPT was the first breakthrough designed useful thing in LLMs. ChatGPT was an a conversation-tuned model built for turn-taking beneath a familiar chat interface. The underlying technology (GPT-3.5) was a slight improvement over the status quo then (GPT-3), but the shaping of the technology did the heavy lifting. By making it easy for people to interact with the model, it unlocked immense user interest and drew widespread media attention.

Second, with the turn-taking chat interface is being as popular as it is, through the increased adoption and continued evolution of the technology behind it, we are seeing a lot of different types of usefulness emerge from its use. People are not merely asking questions of the AI model, but providing text copied from other sources, and then eventually articles, tabular data, images, and all sorts of other data they want the AI model to work with. Today, ChatGPT-like clients are able to search the web, do deep research, and are asked to do more than what it was designed for. The chat interface is starting to show its seams and limitations.

Lastly, from emergent usefulness comes new designed usefulness. We are seeing a lot of other builders taking vertical problem spaces and building dedicated solutions for them. The most successful example right now is in code generation. Tools like ChatGPT and the models behind them are very adept at generating code. New entrants, like Cursor and Windsurf, brings the same capabilities into the IDE where code is being written today. Others, like Lovable and V0, enable people who didn’t previously write code to build software using chat interfaces. There is no doubt there are tons of such examples in the making as we speak.

It becomes clear to me that this is a cycle that plays out and will continue to play out over and over again. First, someone design something to be useful. The usefulness will encourage new emergent usefulness, then others will figure out how to take that and turn it into new designed usefulness. Design, whether formally practiced or not, is in the heart of this transformation.

Usefulness and Design

Most people become designers, regardless of whether that’s their title, because they are motivated to bring usefulness into this world. As a practitioner, I really wanted to explore the tension between the usefulness that is intended as an outcome of design, and the myriad of organic ways that usefulness emerge. Is usefulness an outcome of human endeavor, or is it somehow an inherent property of the world?

For me, it has become evident that usefulness is deeply rooted in both human perception and human effort. Design, both as intent and craft, plays a big part in the formation and transformation of usefulness, and it is a continuous process over time. We shape our environment and are thus shaped by our environment. The outcome is shaped by collective design done by millions of people across generations.

Building in software, especially in SaaS for a long time, there can be a myopia around design that is rooted in the beliefs, processes, and artifacts within the industry. When I apply these narrow lenses towards AI, I get stumped. However, if usefulness is to be the barometer, then the tools that are available to me opens up.

AI is one of the few recent developments in a long time that challenges my paradigm of software design. It has, to some estimation⁶, unprecedented potential to improve our lives-and ultimately, only as useful as we make it.