One of the most important lessons from design school that I carry with me every day is the concept of Hierarchy. I think this was winter term in the second year of the program at Drexel. We were taking a class called Abstract Forms, which was taught by professor Josh Longo (definitely one of my favorite professors from my time at school) (also check out his work, he’s doing a lot of exploration with AI, and does some wonderful work at Crate and Barrel).
The whole point of the class was to create well… abstract forms. These forms were to be comprised of a line, a plane, and a solid, and these came in two flavors: organic and rectilinear. The hierarchy came at three different levels:
Dominant
Sub-dominant
Subordinate
Each week, we were pushed to create different iterations of these forms, with a focus on playing around with Hierarchy. Sometimes the line was the dominant element, the plane was sub-dominant, and the solid was subordinate.
When it comes to my work, this concept very much resides at the center of everything I make, especially when it comes to medical devices. A lot of our conversations and user studies focus on identifying:
What’s the most important thing to the end-user (dominant)
What supporting information do they need so you can make the right decisions (sub-dominant)
What doesn’t matter and can disappear on the product (subordinate)
This lesson was front of mind for me today as we are starting to iron out a design direction for a medical device. The concept of hierarchy was critical in helping us identify how small could we go with the display given the information we needed to present, and the buttons we needed to fit on the screen.
It’s always fun when lessons from college back to you time and again in your design career. It helps you remember how valuable those teachers really were. Sometimes the most important lessons are the simplest ones. I think a lot about this now that I’m teaching for a term, but I’ll share those thoughts another time.
Some of the work from that class. Not all of it was good work, but I learned a helluva lot that’s made me a much stronger designer today:
