Designing the Audience

One of the things designers do is learn about the audience for whatever it is they're designing. But there's design, and then there's design, if you know what I mean. At another level, by another set of people — also designers, although they might not think to call themselves that — are designing the audience and their milieu in order to fit products, or potential products.

For example, think about a huge audience, dead center in the sights of marketers around the world: teenagers. How did that come to be? The marketers just recognized teenagers and focused on that category? No, "teenager" is a created category. Somebody designed the idea of teenagers.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the best source I know of for etymology, and points out that the word teenager seems to have entered common usage in the 1940s. Before you have the word for something, it's harder to conceptualize it and harder to "deal with it" easily. You might not even recognize it. Like that story about the Aleutian people having, what was it, 23 different words for "snow", and they're able to recognize all those types because, having words, they have a ready typology into which to fit their observations. 

If you're a designer, or a marketer, or for that matter a publisher, once you have the word for a category of people you can start to aim at that category, and easily explain to your colleagues what you're trying to do. Before "teenagers", there were only children and adults. And designs, whether of products or of marketing campaigns, were different.