WHAT IS DESIGN ANYWAY?
You can’t write about something if you don’t know what it is.
What a confident statement!
Is that really true? Perhaps you can.
Come to think about it, people write about the unknown all the time. Sure. But in this case, I suspect that it is useful to form some idea about what design is, and what it isn’t, in order to explore how, and why, to write about it.
The problem
"I can no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat; but he knows a rat when he comes across one.”
AE Housman, May 6 1928
Do designers know what design is?
Designers seem to know what design is. They are like Housman’s terrier: design is just what they do, so they know it when they see it. They also know what design isn’t. I am convinced of this, but knowing this fact and positively defining the phenomenon are not the same thing. The above is not much of a definition. So here goes.
Let’s start with the word itself: design is both a noun and a verb. That much is clear. It is a performed activity and/or process (verb), and a product/outcome and/or resulting thing (noun). Perhaps most significantly, designers ‘do’ design, and therefore (to be really dumb about it) design is nothing more than what designers do when they design.
Of course, that is circular, and also less than helpful. So let’s dig in a bit deeper.
One popular definition is that ‘design is problem-solving’. But it is a cliché to define design as primarily problem-solving, and intellectually lazy. This is the definition favoured by architects and industrial designers among others (those who routinely deal with technical problems and functionality in the design process), but it always strikes me as a little too neat. Too trite, and faux-modestly self-aggrandising.
Those who are motivated to highlight the problem-solving aspect of design, to the diminishment of its many other more subjective (and messy) characteristics, seem to be craving or claiming a superior technical or creative legitimacy for their activities. Architects in particular are prone to this.
It seems to be the case that by highlighting the ‘hard’ aspects of design, for example its ability to solve wicked technical and logistical problems, the more ‘soft’ or less defensible aspects are apologised for, or at least glossed over, in some way. These may include the (oftentimes intuitive) application of aesthetics and taste, and other subjective parts of the process.
Most contemporary workplaces and professions require creative problem-solving as a price of entry. This is certainly what surgeons, HR managers, and accountants routinely do, to pick just three random examples. Practically every professional has to regularly apply creativity of one kind of another to solving problems, so I don’t think this can’t really be the basis of a distinctive definition of ‘design’.
A clue despite the circularity of the definition
Despite its intrinsic dumbness, there seems to be a clue in the innocuous idea that ‘design is just what designers do’. Yes, this hints at a more accurate answer to the question “What is design?”
How about this, to flesh it out a bit:
Design is the sum (process and result) of the intentional acts performed by a designer while doing what they would describe as designing, which impart form, shape and structure to change.
The acts are intentional, in that volition and intent of some kind are reliably present, even in the absence of efficacy, common-sense or successful (functional) results. There is an intention, regardless of whether the desired outcomes, or even some results logically consistent with the intention, are achieved.
The acts are performed, in that there seems to be a process that is intrinsically personal and performative. The performed acts give form and structure to the process or physical expression of change, which is to say, shape is imparted - whether physical, organisational, or aesthetic - resulting in expressed change of some kind in the world.
Without change, there is no design.
But what of function? Function, that golden goose of modernism, can be entirely irrelevant, or perhaps more correctly, incidental. Functionality is not a necessary condition of the designed object or process, just a usual condition. Most (but not all) designed artefacts (whether physical objects, buildings, processes, graphics, or whatever) have functionality. But as I say, not all.
This is because design is a broad church. Design must be able to encompass both the absence of function and the presence of dysfunction, as equal potentials with the conditions of functionality. The dysfunctional object may not have purpose or utility at a given moment in time, but that doesn’t mean it is without value.
Look at that Philippe Starck citrus juicer by Alessi (the 1990 artefact “Juicy Salif”). Apparently, it doesn’t really work, but does it have value regardless, being both genuinely visually iconic and collected by museums across the world?
I am more interested in value than function. In my experience as a working designer, form follows value, and intention, far more than function.
Work in progress.
WHAT IS DESIGN, APART FROM BEING JUST WHAT DESIGNERS DO?
Maybe you just know it when you know it.
