There’s been lots of talk about design, what it means, what value it can offer, etc. There’s plenty of both navel-gazing and striking insight. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of simplicity or clarity. I thought I take a stab at some clarity by making my perspective on design concrete with a couple metaphors for design as a professional activity.

The Designer as Physician
Ralph visits the emergency room because he feels a sharp pain in his side. He tells the attending physician about the pain and his suspicion that it might be appendicitis.

She asks Ralph a series of questions about his medical history, about the pain, about his diet and recent activities, and feels around to learn where the pain is most acute. Her diagnosis is that the pain is not from appendicitis but rather from gall stones, and she makes arrangement for the appropriate treatment to remove the stones and stop the pain.

With the gall stones removed Ralph feels no more pain, didn’t have to have surgery and gets to keep his appendix.

This is what professional design as a problem solving endeavour is all about. Understanding the problems or pains people experience, digging beneath the surface symptoms to reveal the underlying causes, and either creating or applying novel solutions to truly alleviate the original pain.

(This isn’t meant to present a design process, rather its just to show the designer as physician analogy)

In this metaphor the essence of design is not a collection of teachable methods; the essence of design is critical thinking. Critical thinking is what is needed to discover the underlying causes of the experienced problem, and recognize the actual causes from mere appearances (similar in a way to recognizing Platonic forms from the shadows). I claim this is the essence of design because as John Carroll says, “the worst misstep one can make in design is to address the wrong problem” (Making Use, 26).

This then suggests that design and style (a contrast I often return to) are not merely different in scale, but different in kind. While style is tactical application, design is strategic determination. The common conflation of design with style leads to many designers thinking that clever information presentation qualifies them as strategic planners on the one hand, and on the other gives business people the equally misguided idea that design is just about pretty pictures. I suppose the distinction between style and design is analogous to Aristotle’s distinction between form and substance–intimately related but markedly different in nature.

Next time, the designer as author.