Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005

THE VALUE OF DESIGN AND THE DESIGN OF VALUE

Introduction

For sociologists of consumption and researchers working in science and technology studies,
design is something of a mystery. Social theorists have yet to consider where design belongs in
debates about the relation between human and non-human actors, in discussions about the social
construction of need and want, or in analyses of consumer culture. Product designers clearly
have a place in the social and institutional organisation of consumption and production and in the
construction of value but what is this ‘place’ and how might it be conceptualised? In this article
we address this question by identifying existing interpretations of the part designers play in
adding value and by showing how these interpretations reflect theoretical understandings of the
relation between people and material artefacts.

As Tharp (2002) points out, value is a slippery and contested topic and one that has different
meaning for consumers and producers as well as for economists, sociologists and anthropologists.
We use Marx's distinction between exchange and use value as a convenient starting point from
which to reflect on the value of design and the design of value, and around which to structure our
discussion. We consider accounts of how designers add value, starting with those which,
implicitly or overtly assume that value is an enduring quality of an object and one that can be
literally increased through design. As we observe, these approaches tend to interpret value with
reference to moments of exchange. Moving on, we consider the views of those who argue that
attributions of value emerge in and through situationally specific contexts of use.

Contemporary debates about design and in particular about what it is that designers do touch
upon issues of materiality and social practice that are of central concern to theorists writing about
the relation between human and non-human actors (Latour 1992). Rather than seeing goods as
neutral carriers of meaning, vehicles of value or embodiments of labour and social relations,
authors like Reckwitz (2002) and Schatzki (1996; 2002) underline the active, constitutive part
things play in configuring everyday practices and hence in shaping cultural values of use and
exchange. It is not yet clear what these arguments mean for the design professions. It is,
however, obvious that theoretical debate about the status of objects has immediate consequences
for what designers do and for our understanding of the types of value that designers add.

Having said that, there are other ways of approaching the question of what and how design
contributes to the production and appropriation of consumer goods. What product design
involves and how it is viewed and understood is also a matter of historical and empirical enquiry.2
In differentiating and commenting on representations of the value of design, and on the tacit
theories of things on which these accounts depend, we identify an important but perhaps not

1
This paper draws upon current research “Designing and Consuming: products, practices and processes”
funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council as part of the Cultures of Consumption
Programme. This project has a number of aims one of which is to explore the potential for theoretical
development at the interface between science and technology studies, design research and the sociology of
consumption.
2
According to Abbott, processes of professionalisation have to do with horizontal divisions of labour and
jurisdictional claims-making; differentiation within professional groups, and larger social forces (1988).
 Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005

surprising convergence between a) theoretical accounts of the material world and b) corporate
and professional interpretations of designers' competence and contribution.

Endowing (exchange) value

Sparke (1983) and Miekle (1979) review the historical emergence and differentiation of tasks
undertaken by industrial product designers. In following this history, Miekle alludes to two types
of added value: one associated with styling and appearance, the other with function and
performance (Miekle 1979: 97; Molotch 2002: 65). Drawing upon his analysis of industrial
design in America in the 1930s, Miekle concludes that certain manufacturers used ‘design’ as a
means of rejuvenating outmoded products. In this context, the value of product design was
strongly associated with improving sales of specific commodities (for example, radios,
refrigerators and ovens) by means of stylistic reform. Writing of the 1980s and 1990s, Julier
(2000) suggests that industrial designers contributed to a system of production in which
distinction and corporate identity were particularly important. In this environment, designers
added value by developing brand images and aesthetic features that promised to unite otherwise
disparate products. Moving on, Molotch (2002) reflects on the spatial dislocation of design,
production and consumption and the challenges this presents for a new breed of global product
designers. Miekle, Julier and Molotch are alike in suggesting that the role and value of product
design are bound up with the wider political economy of production.3

Aspects of social and institutional organisation - for instance, the relative significance of mass
and batch production; the role of local and multi-national companies; the reach and range of
different market - structure opportunities for adding value through design. That said, it is
possible to discern a common logic in which design figures as one amongst other means of
increasing the gap between production cost and price. As an industrial designer interviewed by
Tom Fisher explains, the issue is how to put:

“…perceived value into it [a designed object], so that the customer, the consumer will
pay one pound for an ice-cream scoop or twenty pounds for an ice-cream scoop, when
fundamentally they're pretty much the same ice-cream scoop” (Fisher 2004: 135)

Governments and regions invest in design support and education for similar reasons. For
example, in the UK, Advantage West Midlands and the European Regional Development Fund
are supporting The Centre for High Value Added Products (CHVAP) based at Birmingham
Institute of Art and Design. The CHVAP provides information, advice and assistance to improve
the competitiveness of SMEs through improvements in design, management and marketing
processes and increased awareness of innovation. The centre was developed in response to an
identified need for SME businesses to use design and innovation as way of increasing
competitiveness.

By implication, designers increase competitiveness by endowing objects with extra doses of style,
functionality, brand identity or global salience. For designers, the notion that things which are
deliberately designed to “serve needs and give meaning to our lives” (Heskett 2002: 7) fare better
in the market place has the dual function of generating income and anxiety. Are designers
inadvertently but inevitably contributing to patterns of capitalist advance and unsustainable

3
There is more that could be said about the dynamic relation between design and business. What designers
do is, of course, also related to what advertisers and marketing departments also do and to the types of
product in question. As product types develop so the expected value of design is likely to evolve.

2
 Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005

consumption or are they providing a necessary service in humanising technology and increasing
welfare, for instance by designing for all? In a normative sense, whose values are being added?
For the purposes of the present argument the point is not to resolve this question but to recognise
that either way designers are located as agents with the power to add value or at least act as the
medium through which the social is materialised.
As we have already noticed, designers rarely figure in sociological or anthropological analyses of
material culture and value. One reason is that in much of this literature concepts of value are
conceptually dissociated from the things to which they are attached. For Appadurai (1986),
goods exist in a world of changing meaning and symbolic significance, the dynamics of which are
of immediate relevance for how artefacts are used and consumed. Recognition that the ‘same’
things can and often do have quite different exchange and use value in different contexts lends
weight to the view that objects have no meaning other than that with which users and consumers
endow them. Kopytoff takes this idea forward with the Durkheimian proposition that “society
orders the world of things on the pattern of the structure that prevails in the social world of its
people. …societies constrain both these worlds, simultaneously and in the same way constructing
objects as they construct people” (Kopytoff 1986: 90). It is on this basis that Douglas and
Isherwood claim objects “make visible and stable the categories of culture” (1996: 38).

Design undoubtedly goes on within this semiotic fray but one implication of the anthropological
approaches sketched above is that designers have no special part in making meaning or utility.
Having also noted that “cultural identity is not fixed like a fly in amber but is constantly evolving
and mutating” Heskett seeks to recover a distinctive function for design by suggesting that it “is a
primary element in stimulating the awareness of possibilities” (2002: 133). This is an interesting
argument, and one that points to a very different role (increasing awareness of possibilities) as
compared to those described above (e.g. increasing the gap between cost and price and/or
humanising technology). Social, cultural and relational theories of symbolic value force us to
think again about the contribution of design but before taking up that task, it is important to
recognise the limitations of these theoretical positions. Critically, things are not only tokens of
communication, differentiation and connection. They are also used.

Co-producing (use) value

In describing IDEO's approach to design, Kelley and Littman explain that “we think of products
in terms of verbs, not nouns: not cell-phones but cell-phoning”; (2001: 46).

Design professionals are increasingly aware of - or perhaps increasingly keen to articulate - their
role in scripting, configuring and shaping what people do and how activities are experienced.
Tharp (2002) highlights a number of observations made by Cagan and Vogel, two of which are
especially relevant for the present discussion. Cagan and Vogel suggest that “Since products
enable an experience for the user, the better the experience, the greater the value of the product to
the consumer (2002: 62). In addition, they claim that “the interaction of the product with the user
and the quality of the resulting activity summarize the overall user experience… The goal is to
understand how to create a product that facilitates a positive user experience” (2002: 180).
Overbeeke et. al. (2002) make a similar suggestion, arguing that “the designer needs to create a
context for experience, rather than just a product. He offers the user a context in which they may
enjoy a film, dinner, cleaning, playing, working.. with all their senses.” By concentrating on
things in use rather than things at the moment of purchase, or things as signifiers, these comments
point to a new and somewhat different understanding of the relation between design and value.

3
 Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005

The idea that designers are (or should be) especially capable of producing things that meet
people's needs, that are fit for purpose, ergonomically suitable and functionally effective is not at
all new. This claim has been critical for the professionalisation and scientific development of
design and it remains important today. For example, when asked about the type of value he adds,
one of our design respondents explains that his job is one of:

“making products worth it, …if you look at products and think they are not achieving
their potential, they’re not achieving what they should do as the product they are. So you
ask how can that product do what someone is buying it for, how can it be what it can be.”

Taken literally, the statements by Cagan, Vogel and Overbeeke et. al. depart from this somewhat
essentialist tradition in three important respects.

First, they suppose that interpretations of use and uselessness are contextually specific - they are
not qualities of the object alone but instead arise through interaction between people, situations
and material artefacts. Although often inspired by the goal of product optimisation, one
theoretical by-product of ‘user centred design’ is a growing recognition of consumer creativity.
The point that consumers routinely use things in multiple ways and in ways they were not at all
designed for is of further consequence for design theory. As well as challenging the very idea of
optimising form and function, situated and interactive accounts of the relation between things and
people suggest that it is simply impossible to get the 'human factor' right. On the other hand, and
as scholars of science and technology studies have also argued, interpretive flexibility is not
infinite: there are periods of closure and collective agreement about what things are for and how
they should be used (Bijker 1997). The critical issue, though, is that such stability is an outcome
of social process, not an expression of human need.

Second, the notion of designing an experience - for example, dining or phone calling - brings into
view the fact that things (mobile phones, dinner plates, cutlery etc.) are rarely used in isolation.
This changes the unit of analysis. In so far as they do add value, the implication is that designers
do so not to an individual product but to the complex of material artefacts of which an individual
product is a part.

Third, but perhaps most significant, thinking about products in terms of verbs opens the way for a
much more radical interpretation of the designer's role. In a recent article on consumption and
theories of practice, Alan Warde makes the deceptively simple observation that “items are
appropriated in the course of engaging in particular practices” (2005: 131). Things and doings
interdepend to the extent that entities (i.e. objects) are “tied to action” (Schatzki 2002: 106). The
notion that objects have a “causal impact on activities and practices” (Schatzki 2002: 197)
suggests that designers have an indirect but potentially distinctive hand in the constitution of what
people do. If material artefacts configure (rather than simply meet) what consumers and users
experience as needs and desires (Latour 1992, Akrich 1992, Woolgar 1991), those who give them
shape and form are perhaps uniquely implicated in the transformation and persistence of social
practice. In this context, verb-based interpretations of what we might term “practice oriented
product design” make perfect sense and are perfectly compatible with Graeber's interpretation of
value as the emergent outcome of the many actions in which goods are embedded and of which
they are formed (Graeber 1996; Tharp 2002).4

4
Drawing upon Latour's work, Preda suggests that human and non-human actors are symmetrically
involved in processes of "reciprocal inscription and modification" (Preda 1999: 357). The question of

4
 Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005

Conceptualising design and value

In this article we have considered parallels and points of connection between the ways in which
designers' roles are represented and justified and more abstract theories of the relation between
things and people. The result is a necessarily generalised plotting of positions and perspectives.

In the real world, product designers are commissioned and employed for different, sometimes
contradictory reasons and the nature and extent of their responsibilities varies widely. Designers
and those who write about design frequently subscribe to theoretically incompatible views, often
switching erratically between absolute and relative concepts of value (Cagan and Vogel 2002;
Kelley and Littman 2001). Although this kind of analytic confusion does not appear to obstruct
or prevent normal design work, we have sought to clarify and tease some of the underlying
arguments apart.

We began by exploring the widely held idea that value has something to do with the extent to
which objects fulfil pre-existing (but not necessarily articulated) symbolic and functional
requirements. Framed in this way, designers add value by closing the gap between object and
need and by doing so in such a way that perceived value and price outstrip production costs.

We then considered the possibility that interpretations of value are mobile, contextual and
certainly not inscribed in objects themselves. The implication here is that designers, consumers
and producers are all actively involved in the social and cultural construction and attribution of
utility and meaning.

The third more radical suggestion was that material artefacts themselves configure the needs and
practices of those who use them. While designers may have a privileged role in shaping objects
and thereby influencing the definition and reproduction of composite activities like phoning,
dining, fishing, etc., the dynamics of practice are surely not determined by designers alone.

While these and other interpretations co-exist, there are discernible and relevant trends in the
types of expertise to which designers lay claim and in the kinds of methods they adopt.
Traditional forms of ergonomics are, for example, imbued with quite specific and quite fixed
ideas about the nature of the “man-machine” interface. By contrast, the fashion for so-called
ethnographic enquiry within and as part of the design process indicates the existence, if not the
prevalence, of a more fluid and a more culturally sensitive understanding of material culture.
Swings of methodology may indicate a more fundamental re-positioning of design not only in
theory, but also in the political economy of production.

For most of this article we have been grappling with rather elusive theoretical questions about
concepts of design and value. In conclusion, it is important to recognise that these discussions are
of direct practical and political significance for professional identity and status, for the fees
designers earn and for the type of work they undertake. Like other professions, designers are
bound to a set of tasks by what Abbott (1988) describes as ties of jurisdiction. These tasks and
ties are not particularly stable for they are established and reproduced through the process of
actual professional work (Abbott 1988: 33). In other words, theory and practice run together
with the result that what designers do, and how they go about their business is intimately related
to the sort of expertise they lay claim to and the kinds of values they purport to add.

whether designers and users inscribe and modify and of whether they are inscribed and modified in the
same way deserves further exploration.

5
 Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005

References:

Appadurai, A., Ed. (1986). The Social Life of Things. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Berg, M. (1998). “The politics of technology: on bringing social theory into technological
design.” Science, Technology and Human Values, 23: 456-490.
Bijker, W. (1997), Of Bicycles, Bakelite and Bulbs, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Cagan, J. and C. Vogel (2002). Creating Breakthrough Products: Innovation from product
planning to program approval. London, Financial Times Prentice Hall.
Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1996), The World of Goods: Towards an anthropology of
consumption, London: Routledge.
Fisher, T. (2004) “Plastics in Contemporary Consumption”, PhD Thesis, University of York.
Graeber, D. (2001) Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own
Dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Heskett, J. (2002). Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life. New York, Oxford
University Press.
Julier, G. (2000). The Culture of Design. London, Sage.
Kelley, T. and J. Littman (2001). The art of innovation: Lessons in creativity from IDEO,
America's leading design firm. New York, Currency/Doubleday.
Kopytoff, I. (1986). “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process” in
Appadurai, A. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 64-95.
Latour, B. (1992), ‘Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts’, in
Bijker, W. and Law, J. (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Meikle, J. (1979). 20th Century Limited: Industrial Design in American 1925-1939. Philadelphia,
Temple University Press.
Molotch, H. (2003). Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and
Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are. New York: Routledge.
Overbeeke, K., Djadjadiningrat, T. Hummels, C. and Wensveen, S. (2002) "Beauty in Usability:
Forget about Use" in Green, W. S. and Jordan, P. W. (eds) Pleasure with Products: Beyond
Usability, London: Taylor and Frances (p9-19)
Preda, A. (1999). “The Turn to Things: Arguments for a sociological theory of things.”
Sociological Quarterly 40: 347-66.
Reckwitz, A. (2002), ‘Towards a Theory of Social Practices: A development in culturallist
theorizing’, in European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2):243-63.
Schatzki, T. (1996), Social Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schatzki, T. (2002) The Site of the Social, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press.
Sparke, P.(1983). Consultant Design: The history and practice of the designer in industry.
London, Pembridge Press.
Tharp, B. (2002) “Value: Conceptions in Industrial Design and Anthropology”, available at:
http://new.idsa.org/webmodules/articles/articlefiles/ed.conference02/42.pdf
Woolgar, S. (1991), ‘Configuring the user: the case of usability trials’, in Law, J. (ed.), A
Sociology of Monsters, London: Routledge.