Artifacts, often associated with preserved history, are objects crafted by humans for specific purposes. From everyday utensils to educational materials, artifacts play a crucial role in our lives. Designers, equipped with knowledge of materials, tools, and aesthetics, create and iterate on these artifacts to meet the needs of users. In fields like cooking and education, artifacts shape our experiences and reflect deeper ideas. Unlike archaeologists, today's designers have the advantage of observing and improving their creations based on user feedback. As we design artifacts for the future, they have the potential to become culturally significant and well-crafted testaments of our time.
Artifacts are material or digital objects that have been crafted by humans, which can be manipulated, modified, and used to achieve a goal or purpose. This is the vision most people have for what designers do: that they create things - books and posters, screwdrivers and spatulas, chairs and tables, websites and more. There are a number of professions devoted to the creation of artifacts, and even more for which designing artifacts is one part of a whole set of designerly activities they engage in. (Educators, for example.) These professions often work with raw materials in the natural world and engineer them to meet the needs of users using a range of tools, depending on the materials they are working with. These tools can be those both for physical and digital manipulation of the elements they are working with.
These designers are often trained in professional schools such as in engineering, graphic design, product design, architecture and more. The kinds of knowledge these designers have is an amalgamation of knowledge of the materials and tools combined with an understanding of people who will be using their creations. A key component is the development of a sense of the aesthetic—of the relationship of form to function. Designers in this space combine their skills at visualizing and crafting with materials with their knowledge of their audience to create sketches and other representations to generate original ideas. They iterate on these ideas to create their final designs.
If we take the domain of cooking, the end product of cooking (the dish) is an artifact created for a purpose (nourishment or pleasure). But there are a range of other artifacts that play critical roles in cooking, such as the utensils; recipe books or blogs; the architecture of the kitchen and much much more. These artifacts, or tools, have been intentionally designed for a specific purpose, such as slicing a vegetable a certain way or checking the temperature of a piece of meat in an oven and so on.
Artifacts play a critical role in education as well—ranging from classroom design to the furniture in the room; from posters on walls to textbooks on the shelves; from paper and pencil tests to software that keeps track of student performance…the list goes on. These artifacts are sometimes designed by individuals who may not have formal training in design (such as the student-teacher selecting posters for the classroom) to artifacts that are designed by large teams of people (such as the writing, testing, and publication of textbooks). And these artifacts in many ways instantiate deeper ideas about the nature and role of education.
One of the most important artifacts that play a key role in education are tests. These can be designed for a specific assessment need by a teacher or may be created by a testing service to be used across multiple schools. Much like the domain of cooking, a range of important artifacts play a critical role in creating a test. For example, each test is created of smaller artifacts: single test questions. Test developers design these test questions intentionally for specific purposes then test them with users, in this case, students taking practice tests. According to some estimates, test developers spend around 1 million dollars to develop a single test question on the SAT.