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 what have plants and bees have to do with design? On the surface of it the relationship between plants and bees is an easy one, and is taught in schools from a very early age. Many plants depend on bees and other flying insects to help pollinate by attracting them to their flower and letting it carry the pollen to the next plant and thus become an aid to its pollination. Insect pollination has many advantages over air pollination (where the plant launches its pollen into the wind in the hope of it landing on another one of its species) but still has the perils of the insect visiting various indiscriminate plants and wasting the pollen on non-related species. Where plants have really succeeded though is by evolving various mechanisms that constantly attract a particular insect to its lair, knowing that when it leaves carrying its precious cargo it is more likely to be attracted to one of its brethren rather than an alternative plant. Various such mechanisms have evolved for this very purpose and this is where the element of design comes in - natural design, of course. The process of natural selection is beyond this blog but if you're interested in the process the Richard Dawkins book, 'The Greatest Show on Earth - The Evidence for Evolution' describes the absolute beauty of Darwin's theorum†.
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.Whilst we'll never have to design for bees there is a huge variation of how people interact with design and taking the time to research and consider them for each project is time that is never wasted. Inclusion and accessibility are important considerations in design and understanding that different people view things differently, use things differently and even do things differently at different times helps to create effective design. After all good design should always put its audience first.
By Paul Davies
* Of course you ay disagree with the definition of design versus art, and that could be a whole other area for discussion.
† For those proof readers out there, this is not a mis-spelling but a term from Dawkins to note the difference between a theory which has yet to be proved and one which has moved into fact.
