If you have not come across this German word, calling someone a fachidiot may sound like an outright insult. But it is merely a good word the English language lacks for a common problem: the ability to view every product through the eyes of its future users. Or rather the lack thereof.
Fachidiot is a monomaniac, a person with a blinkered view limited to one particular discipline, a nerd or geek with limited social intelligence. As often in German, the term is made up of two words glued together: Fach = profession, discipline, and idiot = formerly used in medical language, someone with IQ below 20. It is possible that it was first used by Karl Marx, but with a slightly different meaning – he called fachidiots those scientists who refused to see their work within a wider social context.
Fachidiot = someone with views limited to their discipline
At any rate, the second component of the word is only meant as a figure of speech, as the intelligence referred to is purely social intelligence. A fachidiot can be a person who, despite being educated, immensely intelligent, and an experienced professional, is nonetheless something of a monomaniac. Their substantial flaw is the narrow specialization in their field, the absence of certain social communication skills and abilities, and limited empathy. This could equally be an engineer devoid of fundamental notions of the humanities, or a philologist without a hint of technical education, or even someone with an all-round education – but always one who under any circumstances considers their chosen field to be the centre of the universe, which they think interests everyone else just as much as it interests themselves.
All too often do we find this problem in web development and the whole of IT. A large numbers of fachidiots – with the greatest respect for their expertise – populate, in particular, the ranks of IT specialists, namely programmers. It is the main reason why programmers produce websites and applications designed so badly that it is legendary. The issue is not that the programmer of this type was unable to draw or lacked good taste. This is often not true at all. It is instead the outlook limited to their own field that causes the author to design an application from their own point of view, their own priorities and preferences, and for their own needs – rather than those of the user, which tend to be completely different. It has never crossed many an IT specialist’s mind that there is someone who does not want to have the whole application under control and would not want to adjust and customize its every detail. They do not realise that the ordinary visitor will not have the technical skills and equipment that they themselves take for granted. That the user may not be familiar with technical parameters and notions that they assume every schoolboy knows. That the user is not fascinated by technical parameters, details, and calculations the IT guy revels in. That most users, in fact, could not care less.
Precisely this is a sure sign of a real-life fachidiot. It is, of course, found not only among programmers. A similarly afflicted manager will push for a shopping-list app for home users to include aggregation tables and reports with graphs, because obviously every family needs these stats to monitor their spending! A young web development team will fill a website with entertaining features and pop-culture references, because everyone likes cool stuff like that – including, surely, the middle-aged librarians their website is for. A graphic designer crazy about dogs will adorn her app with dog motives, because everyone loves pooches (even the important target audience groups from countries that consider dogs to be either food or unclean)… And mind you:
A designer can, too, be a fachidiot.
Which is quite the paradox, because, as I keep explaining here, the profession of a designer is, by definition, the exact opposite. A real designer strives to think at all times of the user’s well-being, to think for the user, to simultaneously look through the user’s eyes and the client’s, and to always keep in mind the real purpose of the product she is designing: this usually being the client’s profit. True, one would not call a designer thinking and working in this way can a fachidiot. But then there are designers with different priorities, who follow a different school of thought; one which, let’s say, considers functionality an obstacle and maintains that a website’s primary goal is to convey emotions, provide entertainment, or to be a medium for artistic expression. Or possibly to shock and surprise. Or they want to make “something beautiful”.
This may well be so – but it is not, in my opinion, the primary purpose. If the essence, purpose, and function of websites is forgotten or, worse, wilfully ignored, if it is design for design’s sake, for me this is, by definition, the same fachidiocy. With this, designers become pure visual artists crossing out the word “applied” from applied design and reducing design to purposeless style and form. Instead of trying to figure out how a website or an application will benefit the client, they focus on what design pattern to use, what colour scheme, which popular framework, and fashionable visual style.
I am convinced that such excesses lead nowhere and are destined to perish. Design must always come back from such experiments to its roots of being an applied art. Art though it may be, the stress is on the word applied. Always and under all circumstances, it must produce a well-functioning product that will serve both the main purposes, which have already been mentioned here many times: to help, as best as possible, fulfil the needs of users and the goals of the clients. And all the appearance, style, or conveyance of emotions is but added value that must serve – and never contradict – the purpose. Call it design functionalism if you will, I am unopposed to such definition.
