What is Design? A Brief Historical Overview
In what will doubtless be the first of several posts, DLB tries to hone in on what exactly we mean when we say "design".
The first item on my list of open questions from Monday is an absolute whopper: "What is design?"
The term design encompasses so many aspects of our culture that it seems nigh impossible to come up with a definition that is neither so general as to be meaningless nor so specific as to exclude too much. But we’ve got to try. Why, exactly? Because when we say design ethics we mean more than merely, say, graphic design ethics, but less than ethics in general.
Many famous designers have subscribed to very broad notions of design. Among the most broad, Paul Rand claimed that “Everything is design. Everything!” But of course, even if that were true, it’s not very helpful.
Likewise, Steve Jobs has been known to wax poetical about design: “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” While I might use that line to try to get a date, I wouldn’t make an SAT question out of it. But at least it narrows us down to products and services!
Saul Bass said that “design is thinking made visual,” a definition which is quite likeable, but still not exclusive enough. After all, Jackson Pollock certainly made his thoughts visual, but there seems to be a consensus that what he did was not precisely design.
DLB favorite Victor Papanek thought that “design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order” - a definition which also feels like it accurately describes design, but which fails to exclude various un-designy activities like, for example, bookkeeping or playing an organized sport.
Designer Richard Seymour echoed another kind of broad sentiment in 2002, suggesting that design is “making things better for people.” But almost any professional, from doctors to janitors to movie executives might say they, too, “make things better for people.”
Paola Antonelli (of the Museum of Modern Art) offers a more restricted sentiment: “Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something.” This seems to get closer by noting that designs address human needs with technology, psychology, and aesthetics, but those “needs” are still a little ambiguous for my taste.
I think my favorite definition from a practical standpoint - although I must admit that it’s the least pithy and high-minded of the bunch, ego-be-damned - comes from the Design Council’s What is Design brief. I’ll give it to you in context:
Scientists can invent technologies, manufacturers can make products, engineers can make them function and marketers can sell them, but only designers can combine insight into all these things and turn a concept into something that’s desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people’s lives.
This seems to me, at any rate, a great place to start. I’ll try to take this definition and ground it in some explicit examples on Friday.
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