Design thinking inside the box

(I wrote this in an attempt to sort through my own ideas about what content design is and what it could be. After I was done, I kind of ended up not believing it1. I'm still going to make it public ... for no apparent reason.)

This:

Content design means not limiting yourself to just words (..) instead of saying 'how shall I write this?', you say, 'what content will best meet this need?'

This is what the digital needs.

We need to stop thinking about content as words, and instead think of content as that thing that can solve problem X.

People don't want to read, and they don't want to use. Putting either content type as the solution before investigations is not beneficial to anyone.

People typically want to

Looking at the root of what is needed is perhaps what service design is meant to solve now. But it's also much wider and abstract - and locked to the idea of a service, which might not be the thing you need to make.

Or maybe it's what product management/product owners try to do, but often become distant from the process of solving and instead describe the issues we need to address - letting other handle the creative part. They sit firmly on the backlog side and review the work done by the different types of designers.

Content design is what we do when we work together to solve something. It's the application of designing thinking to a problem. Content design as a field should be to facilitate for that process.

We have nothin' but content

After all, what is content really? It's whatever is inside something. When you unbox your new iPhone, then the cords, the papers and also the phone, is the content of that box.

But that phone also has some content. It has apps. And those apps, they have content: the music you listen to and the pictures you've taken.

So content is always a matter for context. A box has a phone, has an app, has an interface, has buttons, that has symbols, that have meaning. Those symbols might be words, but either way they have an intended meaning.

(You users might interpret that meaning different from what you intended and are sort of content providers themselves, injecting their meaning into your content. Those bastards!)

Anyway. When you look at it like this, we're all content designers. And every type of design is a design of content.

I can not imagine designing that is not also a design of something. And since that something always exist within a context, it's always design of content.

And also, unless you're in the woods, that something was probably made by someone with some intention. So it was designed.

Design

So what is the field of Content design, then?

It's the super field. Or at least, it should (or could) be the superfield of design. It is doing the research necessary to pick the best content to solve a particular need, whether that consists of words, illustrations, videos, music, a voice recording, an app, a physical object or something else entirely.

That way content design could be the field that unites all the other fields and finally stop art and copy from fighting over the character count.

Monarch in the shell 2

In her book, Content Design (from which I borrowed the quote at the top), Sarah Richard is unfortunately a bit frozen in wordily content type.

"Content" is often used to refer to the thing that's in the box of a certain page, the essence of that page, or the entire reason that the page exists.

Very often, that content is made up of pictures, words and links. Because very many pages on the web are articles.

But the most popular digital destinations, are not articles. They are apps like Google Search, Facebook, Reddit and Amazon. They are applications, meaning that they are meant to be used for something, not simply read (even though there are many, many words there - but those are usually contributed by others, the users).

Yes, you do visit those pages for the text and pictures and product descriptions and search results, but that is mostly generated by the users themselves. But since content is a matter of content, you can zoom back out and look at what problem the app itself is meant to solve. And that will be the true content of the app. Just like a word has a content in it's meaning, the app has a content in it's meaning, in what it is suppose to solve or be.

Sarah writes that:

This book explains content design. It will tell you what content design means, how it's different from copywriting (..)"

But it doesn't. This is printed on the front of the book: 

As someone who writes for the web 
    I want to learn what content
    design is, and how to start doing it
       So that I can communicate in the 
       most user-centred and efficient 
       way for my audience

And this is the index:

  1. Why content design matters
  2. The science of reading
  3. Content discovery and research
  4. User stories and job stories
  5. Bringing your organization with you
  6. Designing content
  7. Writing content
  8. Pair writing
  9. Crits
  10. Finished pages

It's almost all about writing. 3 The only exception is chapter 4 which is very task oriented.

Yes, words are important. But they are way less important then they used to be.

It's often far better to just do something for people, then telling them how they can do it.

The result is that the book feels a bit dated. It feels as if it was written for the age of hypertext documents, web 1.0, and not able to make the long past overdue leap into web 2.0: the interactive web and worlds of apps.

With the age of robotics, AI, assistance technology and voice UI, the next web/net is knocking on our front door. We need a system and a mindset that helps us make use of the next age. Not the current, and definitely not the previous.

Content strategy and design needs to leave writing behind and let copywriting for the web be it's own subfield along side illustrations, IxD, UI and visual design.

It's all content design at some level:


1. Why I don't believe this anymore? Because if you can not design without content, then content is implicit and the word is superfluous. The superfield of designing should, of course, simply be design. And then the conclusion must be that is no such thing as content design.

2. Because content is king, and content is in the box, and a monarch is a king and there is a cool manga thing that's called "Ghost in the shell". (I'm so, so, sorry).

3. When I re-read this today, 26.09.2020, I realize that Sarah might have meant that content design is different from from copywriting as a subfield of writing, not from writing as a whole. So both content design and copywriting are subfields of writing.

10.10.2018