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I ended up Wednesday settling on a working definition of “design” as something like that special practice of making something that’s desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people’s lives.

Upon further reflection, I realized that I may have been so pleased with those items as criteria for picking out design quality, that I overlooked their clear shortcomings as a definition of design. Why, exactly? Well, where being desirable, viable, commercially successful, and adding value to people’s lives may be excellent criteria for picking out good designs from bad, they’re hardly useful for picking out a design from non-designs. After all, if every design was commercially successful, we’d all be a lot richer. Which means that they aren’t, after all, necessary criteria.

So we’ll have to go it alone. After a couple of days further thought, I’ve decided I’d prefer something like design is the practice of creating an object that is normatively understood to serve primarily commercial purposes. While that’s certainly not as pithy as some of its forebearers, it seems to me critical to definitionally couch design practice in a historical and social context, which none of them do.

Why? Because the only other kinds of viable and practical definitional strategies I can see rely on picking out motives, which makes them incredibly messy to implement. For example, it is no stretch to imagine a case in which some hungry young pop singer’s motivations are far more commercial than those of some thoughtful, say, furniture designer. In this case, if picking out design from non-design relied on their individual motivations, the singer would be a designer, and the designer would be something else entirely. Contrariwise, we’d be hard pressed to argue against the opposite results, which you can get by employing the normative intuition that where chairs are made primarily to sell, songs (and novels, etc.) aren’t. Here, by leaning up against cultural norms rather than individual motivation, we’ve more accurately picked an instance of design.

If this all seems like a dodge to you, in the sense, aka. that it can’t pick out a design in a vacuum, I’d argue that while it may not be as intuitively satisfying in a thought experiment sense as some of the definitions from Wednesday, neither does it suffer from their inability to pick out legitimate instances of design here in the real world. Which, after all, is the point of a definition. In other words, the vacuum for the world seems to me an excellent trade.

Design’s special relationship to the commercial sphere is what makes criteria like being desirable, viable, commercially successful, and adding value to people’s lives meaningful for it. So, you might fairly ask, “why should there be any ethical concerns that are relevant to the success of a design?” (Or, I might.)

Answering that question is what I’ll take up next week.