There is so much talk of “design” and its strategic importance floating around these days. However no one, least of all designers, can agree on what exactly design as a professional practice means in any consistent and practical way (just read any DMI report for a taste of the fluff that passes for design scholarship). Unfortunately, the word “design” seems to be about as meaningful as the phrase “family values”.
Perhaps as individual designers some of us can lucidly specify what it is exactly that we do and how it is valuable. Unfortunately we cannot manage to do this as a collective, and certainly not with the consistency and clarity the business world needs in order to understand how design benefits them and how to integrate it into thier activities.
While undoubtedly fertile ground “design†as is it commonly used is far too fluid, too situational, and too mercurial to provide much of a professional foundation. To build a credible profession that offers consistent value and clearly communicates both this value and the methods for collaboration, we need not only fertile ground but stable ground.
This means that we designers will have to give up some fertility to gain some stability. To do this we will have to find the strength to appropriately position design and commit to it. But the design world is terrified of committment. And rather than face this fear, this weakness, the design world through some rather nice double think (Buchanan, page 6) prefers to convince itself that this weakness is actually strength.
However, Michael Porter says the strength to make the committment to do somethings and not other things is the essence of strategy. His logic is as follows. Strategy is all about taking a clear position. Position is all about making tradeoffs. And tradeoffs are deciding what you do do and what you don’t do, and sticking to it. So if you cannot be clear about what you don’t do, you cannot be clear about what you do do, and the whole stratgic house of cards falls apart.
This problem frustrates me because it holds all of us back and has some of its roots in design education. Take Herb Simon’s academically popular definition of design “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” It is expansive to the point of meaninglessness. Our inability to define design or its position hinders the credibility of design as a strategic competency. At some point soon we will have to get over our timidity. If we can’t I’m afraid designers will become irrelevant as other disciplines claim the professional territory we wouldn’t. We are standing on a burning platform folks.
PS
Here’s a recent exmple of the confusion over what design really is….
– Michael Bierut says design is innovation
– Larry Kelly says nonsense, don’t conflate the two
– Mark Hurst suggests simplicity is the new innovation
So design is, or is not, innovation or simplicity depending on who you ask. Well that clears it all up.
Hey niblettes,
Love your blog and active postings around the designo/innosphere! This post caught my attention because I’m afraid you exhibit some of the symptoms that cause your frustration. First, there is little chance of defining design in a sentence or two that will be both factually accurate and that all designers will agree to. One of the main problems is that design is so focused on defining itself as if that will allow others to understand it and make more use of it. Take other disciplines and ask the same question. What is engineering? Whoa — big messy answer and it will change depending on which engineer you ask. What is marketing? Same. What is business? Yep, messy. How about subfields? What is Strategy? Actually Porter answered it with his article by the same name, yet there remains many “schools” of strategy some of which don’t even acknowldege Porter’s definition. Fields are diverse as are the professionals and academics of which they are made. Fields are developed by a search for theories, principles, and methods as well as healthy argument and debate. Design can’t and won’t be defined in a way that all can agree. But that’s OK, it means its finally growing into a discipline!
Happy New Year!
Thanks for posting Chris. Here are some of my responses:
– A former professor of mine used to say that every profession has an obligation to make its monopoly explicit. So a stable definition is part of what separates professions from mere practices or crafts. I believe design deserves to be a profession, but we have failed in this regard.
Is it not clear why you would visit a dentist versus an account? Between an oral surgeon and an orthodontist? Why should it be any less clear why you would hire a designer and what kind? Now how many middle managers can distinguish between an IA and an ID (interaction or industrial designer)? What kind of designer would an executive know to turn to for strategic planning? Now, who would you call to get braces?
– I don’t think engineering is as messy as you say. The distinctions between say civil and electrical engineering are very clear. If want a road built I’m pretty certain I know which one to call. While no one can really define art, do my occasional napkin doodles make me an artist? Perhaps, but no more an artist than anyone else–and so to call myself an artists as a result of these doodles might be correct in some broad ontological sense but it would be entirely meaningless.
– Design as a field of inquiry is very different from design as a professional practice. So while I agree with what you have said in terms of design as field, I do not agree in terms of design as profession. Clients pay professionals for results. For this to happen clients must first understand what sort of results they can expect from the profession and how those results fit within their existing business framework. If it is not adequately clear what professional designers do, what results they deliver and how it all fits, then I’m afraid we design practitioners will suffer–a confused market is a market that won’t buy.
– I don’t think its necessary to define design with the same rigor as lawyers and physicians define their professions. However I do think we need to be a lot more rigorous, if only to help prospective clients of our profession better understand what value we can offer (this doesn’t mean growing the laundry list of things we do, but rather focusing it, simplifying it, so outsides can understand and act appropriately)
(Witness AIGA has gone the other was, removing “graphic†from design. While this may be buzz worthy, I doubt it will help in the long run)
– Where does the mountain end and the valley begin? Just because there is no fixed boundary that everyone agrees upon doesn’t mean that we cannot distinguish between the two. While these places blend together at their peripheries, their centers are very different and distinct indeed. Clearly a mountain is different from a valley.
What is design’s center? The fact that we can’t even agree on this (forget about the periphery) is what troubles me so much.
Ironically my response isn’t terribly focused. I blame the cold I’ve been battling for a few days now. Sorry.
Hey niblettes,
OK, good, let’s keep this going. If I am designing a product, I will search out product designers. If I am designing some brochures or a corporate identity I will look for a graphic or communication designer with relevant experience.
If I am designing a house, I look for an architect. If I am going to engineer a new audio component, I’ll look generally for an audio/electrocal designer and a mechanical designer. But with all this looking, I still need to discriminate and evaluate among the alternatives. Engineering is not as cut and dried as you say. There are lots of design engineers who fail to get hired because they don’t have the relevant experience even though they are labeled an engineer.
Now ther is a professional engineering exam which is just an advanced from of a standardized test. Just having dicussed this with a colleague who is a civil engineer, it would seem it does not really help distinguish engineers from others. It distinguishes those who are familiar with and can solve the kinds of problems found on that exam. And those problems are often not very much like real world engineering problems.
A professional designer, product, graphic, environmental, or interactive, is one who provide visual and/or interactive specifications for how the elements of a given design should be arranged/assembled/built so that they better communicate with or serve their intended audience. Criteria for this arrangement are mostly based in human factors and aesthetics that ultimately provide a better human experience with the new artificial system. This is what a designer does — it really isn’t mysterious even though designers constantly debate this role.
How’s that?
😉
Once again, thanks for posting.
“A professional designer, product, graphic, environmental, or interactive, is one who provide visual and/or interactive specifications for how the elements of a given design should be arranged/assembled/builtâ€
I’m not sure I agree with that (which illustrates the problem: the lack of even basic agreement over what ‘design’ is as a discipline or a practice). Many define design as a problem solving activity. I lean that way too but don’t think problem solving alone is accurate enough. This is because to really solve a problem requires an understanding of both the problem and the people who experience it. So for me design is an endeavour to understand the problem, to understand the people experiencing the problem and then to solve the problem (and only then to spec the solution).
To expand a bit more: I look at my job as a designer in terms of first identifying, deconstructing, analyzing, and understanding the problems a target audience experiences, second studying, modeling and understanding the audience, their goals, motivations, behaviours, experiences and attitudes, and third inventing novel solutions or novel juxtapositions of existing solutions that will alleviate these problem and help audience members better achieve their goals, align with their motivations, facilitate better behaviours, optimize experiences and improve attitudes. (Traditional specification writing I avoid or delegate) .
What I have described above is of enormous value. But it isn’t graphic design. It isn’t architecture. Graphic design schools simply to do not teach the core critical thinking, analysis and modeling skills necessary to understand problems and the people who experience them. And I would not be qualified to create your next annual report or poster.
In other words, despite what we may say there are significant functional and practical distinctions between designers in reality. And to not make explicit about them is, I feel, counter productive.
If we can’t even make meaningful and consistent distinctions within the design world for and among ourselves, how are outsiders supposed to make sense of it? How are they supposed to know that hiring graphic designers to conduct a contextual inquiry is like going to a dentist for Ritalin prescription? He is qualified and legally permitted to write prescription, right?
So treating designers as a kind of undifferentiated mass does a disservice to me and my particular talents, it does a disservice to other kinds of designers who have their particular talents (like graphic designer), and it does a disservice to our market by confusing them as to which one will best help them get what they need.
(There is a big different between there being some individual designers who can easily bridge between various kinds of design, and there is something inherent in design that makes all of the discipline’s practitioners capable of such bridging. Anecdotes of flexible multi-talented designers strikes me as exceptions that prove the rule).
I get the feeling I’m wandering a bit now, so I’ll just end here before I go off into the woods too far.
“Design” as a verb refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a new object (machine, building, product, etc.). – wikkipedia.
1 : to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan : DEVISE, CONTRIVE
2 a : to conceive and plan out in the mind – Websters
That’s sort of my point. This describes an activity to pervasive that not only do all people do it, but a number of animal do it. And if you read Roger Penrose’s The Emporer’s New Mind, there are some inorganic crystaline structures that exhibit a similar behavior. So how can one realistically claim to make a professon out of this?
And reference material like encyclopedias and dictionaries reflect rather than perscribe. It up to us to make the definition.