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.

Read More...

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.

Read More...