The language of design

One of the most unique classes I took at Stanford was a product design elective called “Elements of Form”. Nominally helmed by my legendary advisor Rolf Faste, it was mostly run by a stylish Italian designer named Massimo, or Maximo, or something equally cool.

Each class he would dim the lights, fire up the projector, and start showing images of objects on the screen. He’d point to one of us, say “Go”, and that person would start describing the object in as much detail as possible.

Ok, it’s a green, globulous, um, shiny, um, vase thing, um…”

As soon as that person ran out of steam, he’d point to someone else and have them continue where their classmate left off.

It has 4, no wait, 5 images of centaurs on it, or maybe they’re just horses? The spout opening thing is flared on one side with a silver lip around it, and, um…”

The first few sessions were pretty painful as we struggled to turn what our eyes saw into clear, descriptive language. But as the quarter went on, we started to get the hang of it. We developed techniques for separating out parts from the whole, picked up good descriptors from each other, and generally learned the language of industrial design, something most of us had only intuited before.

I’ve thought about that class a lot in the past year as AI has upended a lot of software design practices. Now that generating visuals and code is easier than ever, the burden shifts toward expressing what you want. Most of us when using AI tools have an idea in our head of what we want, but the tools can’t access that. The bottleneck is turning those ideas into language that LLMs can work with. Developing and maintaining your vocabulary of design remains an important task for professional and aspiring designers alike.

I also think that we’ll develop tools that let you express your desires in other ways; I’m working on one myself that’s a highly visual experience. But I believe there will be lasting value in being able to turn your thoughts into the language of design.