What is Design? A response to Paul Anater’s question
Good question.
Some other bloggers are posting their answers as well, including Paul Anater, Dog Walk Blog, Modenus, & Concrete Detail. I just happened to butt in, in my own classic barge-like way!
Design = Making Things
To me, design is thinking through how something will be used. The products of design are things that we employ to get something done.
So in the spirit of Paul’s definition, I’ll make some order out of chaos:
Kitchen Design To enable daily sustenance, social interaction and the practice of meal making
Graphics To convey information, such as location maps or info-graphics, branding, aesthetic elements like fabric patterns
Industrial Design To get us physically from point A to point B, to help us communicate & navigate
Building Design to create places where we can have fun, worship, sleep, learn & work
Engineering To provide the skeletal & life systems to structures that get us places (roads, bridges, transport vehicles), and keep us comfortable (electrical, HVAC, plumbing)
What about Good Design?
In my mind, Good Design is not just about design to get to the end product. To me, Good Design is about making things that are
- durable,
- efficient, both in use and use of material in the making,
- flexible according to the user needs,
- have minimal ongoing maintenance costs,
- of a lifecycle that is responsible to the biosphere & lithosphere of our planet.
That last one is fodder for a whole new blog post, but that’s my nutshell.
Nature?
I would pose that nature designs itself. Even though it doesn’t sit down & push it around on paper like humans do.
In looking at Paul’s fern, nature made it so it could poke through the dirt toward the light, unfurl, & have lots of leaves to make its own food.
That’s pretty complicated – but damn efficient. It doesn’t have anything extra – just what it needs to live. Which poses the question about the photo above: is it design? is it art?
Way to melt my brain on a Tuesday morning, Paul!
Glad I could provoke some morning thinking. It’s a really wild question. At least for those of us engaged in the business of designing things.
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