Design of Personality

Or maybe the Personality of Design. My latest thoughts on design are coming from an angle of personality. I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist so I am looking at it from the angle most accessible to me, which is from the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory. Certainly not infallible or absolute but at least a starting point.

 Two sides of the coin here: the impact of personality of the designer/artist on the final product; and the impact of personality of the viewer on their response to it.   It’s kind of like the literary theory of Reader Response, which tries to accommodate the individual’s response into a valid interpretation of the text. What I am trying to put my fingers around is not so much the individual’s response but the response of an individual who resides within a given personality grouping.

So, going with the Meyers-Briggs groupings (there are 16 subsets) as an example, I would start with the category of Perceiving, which deals with how one takes in information from the world around them. This category is broken down into Sensing versus Intuition and when you are tested you fall somewhere on a scale between the two extremes.

The definitions provided by Meyers-Briggs describes Sensing as Preference for taking in information through the five senses and noticing what is actual; Intuition is a preference for taking in information through the “Sixth sense” and noticing what might be.

I immediately sense (being Intuitive) that these two groups could easily have different reactions to design, art, literature and so on. Looking at the other categorizations of the Meyers-Briggs, I suspect they too would impact one’s response.

Perhaps my new goal is to discover how to put the personal into design. Because if one of my goals is to provoke a certain response from my client or audience then I need to know how they might react and using personality as a gauge might give me insights I might miss otherwise.

So much to think about so little time.  More on this later.

This entry was posted on 24. June 2008 at 10:50 and is filed under Designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.