The clueless consumers and their lack of discrimination

Here a poster that comes straight from Jay Doblin's  "Discrimination: The special skills required for seeing, and the curious structure of judgement"which appeared in the Design Processes Newsletter of the Institute of Design.

The main focus of the poster is Doblin's 3x3 matrix that attempts to succinctly explain why consumers make such bad taste choices when buying products.

If that does not sound like a serious topic for a paper, you are right.


Read the opening words:

"After a lifetime as a designer and three decades spent pondering these abominations as a design professor, a small insight has happened along. It has arrived unsupported by research, unblessed by marketing professionals, completely devoid of any objective or methodological analysis. Fact is, I just made it up. It will amuse a few of you, offend a great many more. For me, it helps explain some of the most profound conundrums of consumer behaviors, market patterns, and trends in the field of design"

Still, some people might still take the thoughts in the article seriously given the publishing format, the writing style, and the skillful use of structured thinking for such a seemingly banal topic. 

A fantastic piece of high-brow design humor that Steven Heller could easily pick for one of his next books about design being a practice that among other virtues can also provoke laughter.