What is design?

This is not some philosophical post about design theory nor an essay about the roots of the term. I just want to add some thoughts on design, especially in the digital context and how I understand it and put it into practice.

Let’s ask Wikipedia first: “Design is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object, system or measurable human interaction …”

Well, that is one of many definitions and it’s fair to say that there’s not one definite definition of what design truly is. Wikipedia further says, that “the person designing is called a designer” and herein lies the first problem, when it comes to design. Everyone can call themselves a designer these days. You can also call yourself nutrition consultant – no need to own a degree for that. Of course you can study design or communications design but does it say something about whether you’re qualified to call yourself a designer because you received some bachelor or masters degree? I very much doubt it. But back to the question.

For me design is truly functional.

For me design is truly functional. That means design for me tries to solve problems or tries to guide users towards a specific goal. That’s why I’m also convinced that it’s fine to follow a pragmatic approach sometimes to solve a “design” problem. Design for me is also fundamentally different from art. Although a designer should strive to make an object aesthetically beautiful, design should always follow a superior goal. Creating something beautiful just because doesn’t deserve the term design. If your mission is to make things beautiful you’d call yourself an artist. By the way, whenever I ask myself what design is, I remember Ariel Cotton’s talk at beyond tellerrand from 2016. In a couple of slides she asked “Is this design?” and the slide showed an apple, a cow and the universe. The repeating question “Is this design?” still resonates in my head. You can watch it here.

So if you don’t need a degree to be a designer, what do you need? Fair question. To recap, design for me is always functional and tries to solve problems. That being said conceptual thinking is an integral part of design. Being able to describe a problem in words is crucial. Being able to provide at least one solution to solve a problem is as well quite handy.

As an example, if your online shop doesn’t get new customers you should be able to investigate why and find a solution to address this specific problem. You’d probably call yourself digital designer or web designer. But you can also design the invisible.

Elon Musk acknowledged that the structure of a start up is more effective to solve problems or to face challenges than the usual big corporate structures. By setting up SpaceX as a start up he managed to be faster than everyone else when it comes to building rockets. He designed a better process to address problems and face challenges.

At diesdas.digital (the company I co-founded two years ago) we are slowly changing the way how we hire designers. When we started we simply looked at a designer’s portfolio, had a longer interview and then made a decision. There are two problems with this. First of all a designers portfolio mostly shows work samples that have been created by a team. So you never really know what part was done by the person you’re interviewing. Second, you rarely get an idea of the conceptual thinking behind the designer’s work.

Design does not equal art.

We want to know how the designer thinks and we want to get an idea of their actual visual design quality. So we decided to always ask the applicant to do a design exercise for us. That gives us a much better idea of the person we’re hiring and whether the person is a good fit. And it is definitely not important whether the applicant has a degree in design. The quality of most design schools is insufficient, unfortunately.

To sum up – for me design is first and foremost functional. Design does not equal art. You can design objects or you can design the invisible (e.g. processes). To find good designers you need to understand how they think. And if you have a degree in design, fair play to you but it doesn’t say anything about the quality of your designs.

And by the way – we’re hiring!