As designers, we know that understanding the audience and their needs is crucial in achieving a successful piece of design. Design colleges teach students (or at least should) to design to a brief and not to their own fashions or likes. This empathy with an audience is a key difference between design and art, where a designer's hand is guided by a wholly different 'requiredness' from which informs paintings or a work of sculpture. Such is the importance that a design project often starts with a large phase dedicated to identifying the audience and defining their aims and objectives. This is especially true in the website design sector as there is a need to outline the criteria to measure whether the website was a success of not. Indeed a whole area of professionalism has developed to cater for this very need and you will now see a growing market for User Experience consultants (or UX consultants) within the design sector.
So with the knowledge that many plants have evolved with the purpose of attracting particular insects for the purpose of helping them to pollinate we can look at the plant as the designer and the insect as the audience. In Dawkins' book he uses a particular example to show this, the evening primrose (Oenothera), and this is a rather good example to unpick how its design successfully attracts its particular audience, in this case a bee (although other insects such as certain moths also are attracted by the evening primrose). The evening primrose develops a bright yellow flower which acts as the enticer and landing strip that guides the bee down to the stamens where the pollen hitches a ride on the bee's hairy abdomen. But this is wrong, we're not yet thinking like the audience. Insects have very good colour vision but they differ from humans in that it is shifted over towards the ultraviolet end. Therefore as good designers we should try and look at the flower as the audience would. Taking the evening primrose flower and placing it under an ultraviolet filter shows an intricate pattern that is beyond the human range of vision. It is this nectar-guide design which has been created to please the audience, not the one that we see. Taking a little time to investigate the audience has led us to a successful explanation.
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