{"id":32,"date":"2005-11-30T02:40:14","date_gmt":"2005-11-29T21:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/?p=32"},"modified":"2021-06-12T03:41:42","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T03:41:42","slug":"defining-design-a-small-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/2005\/11\/30\/defining-design-a-small-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining Design – A Small Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is so much talk of “design” and its strategic importance floating around these days. However no one, least of all designers, can agree<\/a> on what exactly design as a professional practice means in any consistent and practical way (just read any DMI<\/a> 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”.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

While undoubtedly fertile ground \u00e2\u20ac\u0153design\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>) prefers to convince itself that this weakness is actually strength. <\/p>\n

However, Michael Porter says<\/a> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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. <\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m afraid designers will become irrelevant as other disciplines claim the professional territory we wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. We are standing on a burning platform<\/a> folks.<\/p>\n

PS
\nHere’s a recent exmple of the confusion over what design really is….<\/p>\n

– Michael Bierut says design is innovation<\/a>
\n– Larry Kelly says nonsense, don’t conflate the two<\/a>
\n– Mark Hurst suggests simplicity is the new innovation<\/a><\/p>\n

So design is, or is not, innovation or simplicity depending on who you ask. Well that clears it all up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}