What is Design?
“What is Design?”
“Oh, it depends…”
There are many layers to this question, and I tried to break it down to the nature of design, the core design activity, and the process of design.
What is design? It’s about making intentional change
If I were to use one sentence to describe the nature of design, then I would quote Nelson & Stolterman 2003 that “design is about making international changes”. Everyone who’s breathing on this earth is making changes all the time, every action has consequences and the ripple effect brings a chain of reactions that we may not even be aware of. Everyone can design, but not everyone is a designer, so the word “intentional” is important. The intention behind the changes we are making is what separates designerly ways vs non-designerly ways. Design is not accidental, it’s intentional. Innovation doesn’t come randomly like a spark, rather it’s logical and traceable. Design and science share many more characteristics than many would think. Designers and scientists are dedicated to understanding the current phenomenon and finding a solution to a problem. What sets the two disciplines apart, however, is that “Design is a ‘satisficing’ activity: rather than to optimize, that is, to calculate the optimum value, or to choose the best solution among all possible solutions, designers settle for the good enough” (Visser, 2009).
Are designers just lazy so that they settle for good enough design? Can’t designers just be hard-core and work like engineers?
I have to admit that I had such doubts when I first started my design journey. Whenever someone presents a design solution, I always wondered “how do you know this is the best option?”. This kind of question is clearly asked under the assumption that design should be like science, and accuracy and optimization is the success indicator, and this assumption doesn’t serve well when we try to understand design because of the kind of problems designers and scientists are dealing with are fundamentally different, and so the goals of their work are fundamentally different.
So what problems do designers work with?
Wicked problems! Almost all real-world problems are wicked. They are complex, dynamic, and have unlimited ways of framing the problem situation (Ylirisku & Falin 2008). In addition to the wickedness of the existing problem space, designers also deal with the “moving target” problem that is whenever we introduce new elements into space, whatever problem space we were looking at will not be exactly the same. This is why dealing with wicked problems makes listing out all possible opportunities and optimizing design options practically impossible. From my experience, whenever I design, I can never be 100% sure of what will happen when launching a design in the real world, because our environment is highly unpredictable, and demands and sources change continually.
This is why I found design to be so fascinating it is not just designing the looks and feel of some artifacts, rather it’s learning how to live! The nature of design is not only solving problems but coping with complexity and uncertainty.
The nature of design in dealing with uncertainty and complexity highlights one important skill -- thinking. “Thinking should be treated as a complex and high-level kind of skill” (Bartlett, 1958), and this is the core of design expertise.
What is design? It is a cognitive activity
Design is about learning, thinking, and reflecting. The look of design comes from the designer’s craft skills, but the depth of design comes from the designer’s mind. To train our minds and acquire expertise in design requires intentional practices and active reflection in action. Turns et al 2014 provided a delicate definition of reflection, which is “an intentional and dialectical thinking process where an individual revisits features of an experience with which he is aware and uses one or more lenses in order to assign meanings to the experience that can guide future action”. To be a reflective designer, it’s not just looking back and thinking retrospectively after a design project is done, rather the reflection is in-situ and in the moment. It is about having “a reflective conversation within themselves and the existing and designed problem situation” as a way to deal with the persisting uncertainty and ambiguity (Adams et al, 2003).
How do you do design? It’s iterative, messy but logical
Drawing from my Engineering Education Professor, Robin Adams’s process of inquiry sketch, and the idea of co-evolution from Dorst, K. (2019), I created a visual representing my design process, which is an iterative loop of divergence and convergence.
Design as a co-evolution process between problem and solution
Design is the process of synthesizing. It starts with recognizing the messiness of a problem situation, sitting with uncertainty and the unknowns, Through mapping and cross-examing various data points, I found a sense of order in such “chaos‘
Problem framing is key to the design. It means shifting perspectives, changing the very words we use to describe and interpret the problem, and taking on metaphorical design framings to drive innovation
References:
Adams, R. S., Turns, J., & Atman, C. J. (2003). Educating effective engineering designers: The role of reflective practice. Design Studies, 24(3), 275–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0142-694x(02)00056-x
Bartlett, F. C. (1958). Thinking an experimental and Social Study. Basic Books.
Dorst, K. (2019). Co-evolution and emergence in design. Design Studies, 65, 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.10.005
Turns, J., Sattler, B., Yasuhara, K., Borgford-Parnell, J., & Atman, C. (n.d.). Integrating reflection into Engineering Education. 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--20668
Ylirisku, Salu & Falin, Petra. (2008). Knowing in Situated Design Action.