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Designing Design
I’ve been reading a book called “Toothpicks and Logos: Design In Everyday Life” by John Heskett, a professor at the Institute of Design (at the time of writing - 2002). Heskett, in discussing why my field is so hard to explain, offers the following as an example of the word “design’s” semantic variegation:
“Design is to design a design to produce a design.”
Heskett then goes on to show how every use of the word in that sentence is both grammatically correct and representative of a separate definition of the word.
I don’t believe that the problem of describing Design effectively is small or irrelevant. As a summer intern at Intuit I find myself working closely with engineers for the first time, and am often at a loss as to how to explain the value of what I do because I cannot properly define design. If I cannot define designs, then I cannot express the value of Design to people who have not worked with designers before, and I can’t expect them to seek out my contributions. I once wrote a paper on this where I described design as “finding, defining, and solving human problems pragmatically through the creation of products” but that definition requires quite a bit of definition itself. I believe that the root of the problem, as stated by Richard Buchanan, is that “design has no domain.” That is, design is a way of thinking and working that can be applied to any area of business (or otherwise), but which is not specific to any product type or activity.
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July 10th, 2008
Posted by Paul in Design Thinking |