Designer Jargon

The main communication tools for designers are drawings, sketches and models. The style of designer drawings and prototypes can be described as the “jargon” of designers – the drawing style can reflect the assumptions and desires of designers.

The use of jargon is significant for the degree of adaptation of people into an organisational culture; It binds specific groups together and creates a boundary of language to other groups. The style of designer drawings can be soft or aggressive, light or dark, reduced or full of patterns, geometric or dominated by artistic strokes; Different design departments and design consultancies mostly have their own style which contributes to their shared assumptions.

The essence of design drawings are – to an extent – understood across national cultures. However, the interpretation of their value and meaning is culture-specific and depending on individual designer’s knowledge, beliefs and paradigms.

A designer will see the concept or interesting features behind a the sketch of another designer, while a non-designer might have troubles deciphering the message in a design sketch.

Nigel Cross states that the use of sketches, drawings and other models constitutes a coherent and symbolic media system for thinking and communicating in design. Designers see the features and problems in a design and improve it in hermeneutic and dialectic “sketch discussions”, where one sketch is complementing another.

The result of this constant refining and reconsidering is finally presented to management in a “polished” form, a drawing or model which defines every detail of the design drawing. Designers with experience develop a “design eye” and see features of a design a non-designer would not see.

This is perhaps similar to scientists or other specialists who develop a common understanding of their field; They might not share worldviews and opinions, but they share a particular knowledge, which enables them to collaborate on a project despite being different personalities from different cultures and backgrounds.

Krippendorff describes that vocabulary creates “structure within textual matter that is based on selectively (re)cognizing similarities in the compositions or usages of artifacts: (re)combinable and (de)composable forms, components or assemblages, much like words, and syntactic structures”.

The understanding between designers is indeed relatively homogenous across firms and cultures. The change of a design can be discussed in a similar way with designers from Latvia, Germany, the United States or South Korea – the nessecary fore-understanding was established by education and experience.

The drawing or mock-up as the main communication tool is complemented by a visually orientated, spoken language which is used during the design process. The spoken language used between designers is mostly a result of other forms of visual representation. Depending on the discipline, it will involve colours (“this colour creates too much contrast, tone it down”), shapes (“the curve here should be smoother, this would also make it easier for tooling”), composition (“the detail here is too dominant, it would distract the attention of the user from the main button”) or, in media design, the choreography of actions (the movement here in front should be shorter and smoother to reduce loading time on the internet, while the element in the background should slowly disappear by reducing the hue”).

This language is predominantly visual, aesthetic, and often also simultaneously focused on the user (ergonomics, usability) or technical solutions. This “language of design” used in the design process is relatively universal. However, this does not apply to the assumptions behind the concept of a design object, which are depending on world-views and cultures.

The aesthetic value of colours, shapes and compositions are perceived differently in different cultures, a colour or shape one designer finds aesthetically pleasing will be perceived as uninteresting by another. This disparity is, on the one hand, enhanced between different regional cultures with different aesthetic preferences, and on the other hand equalized by “dominating designs”, i.e. designs which are supposed to be right, are conceived by role-models (famous designers) or are dispersed by a dominating culture.