Alluring Design

By Thomas Ask • June 2026

“Sounds like the crushing of a Styrofoam cup,” was my fleeting thought until I finally fell into the muddy water. I had just crashed through an old pier as I was getting off a boat on the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. I was a bit too heavy for the old, rotting wood. This was one of the hazards of exploring boats and walking on sketchy piers and scaffolding. I spent over six months studying traditional fishing boats in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines during 2025. I was researching the balance between familiarity and innovation. At what point do new designs get accepted, and what factors are involved with balancing familiar and novel approaches?

Designers love to create new things. We love innovative ideas that make the world more alluring and pleasant. However, adopting new ideas is a contorted path. Part of that path has to contend with cultural heritage and other non-mechanistic forces.

I’ve spent over 30 years studying traditional Asian boats to understand the balance between craft knowledge and engineering. I have been striving to identify the reasons for maintaining traditions and resistance to change. Sometimes familiarity is more important than optimization. While optimization can be the goal of AI and engineering, it is not necessarily people’s goal. The push for innovative technology isn’t always the problem-solver it purports to be. 

Designers need to consider other interests besides wrapping plastic around technology and making pretty things. We need to understand the background context of a design. Sometimes the process of using a design is valued in its own right. The process can be enjoyable and reinforces trust.  We need to connect the future with the past in an assuring manner.

Some innovations are quickly adapted and rapidly spread. However, there are designs that we have to trust with our lives, such as fishing boats. These designs have a higher standard of assurance. The assurance can’t simply be numbers from some performance test, they have to visually communicate their purpose, be easily adaptable and repairable, and have to reflect deeply rooted values.

For example, the floatability of wood is a trusted quality in wooden fishing boats. Wood floats, steel doesn’t. Parts of the world without rescue services or life rafts motivate fishermen to rely on their ability to repair wood in time-trusted ways. They can also use wood (and the universally adopted plastic barrels) to keep them afloat.

The dance between optimization and human factors doesn’t frighten designers. We know how to step into this complexity. We’re experts on the tapestry of factors that go into alluring design. We reach out to connect all the interdisciplinary dots that lie outside the reach of many professions.

This reach lets us swirl a distinctive blend of ethnography, engineering, and art. For example, ethnography opens a corridor of study that pushes design into the truly “user-centred” arena. Questionnaires, surveys, and observations present insights that can guide us and constrain our egos. One technique for developing appropriate designs for unique customer demographics is to compare a proposed design with a familiar design.

The comparison with a visual stereotype, an exemplar of customer anticipated design, encourages the appropriate balance between familiarity and variety.

These ethnographic methods feed into the interdisciplinary swirling of ideas that create allure.