Defining Design
Design as community
The challenge of defining design recently recaptured my attention as a “scholarly” debate unfolded on a listserv well-known in academic design circles — Don Norman, Ken Friedman, David Sless, and others are deep into an exchange as I write. The following is a slightly re-edited essay I originally authored in Fall, 2018, while taking a graduate seminar taught by Mary Anne Beecher; my essay is a personal and reflective response to an open-ended prompt to — you guessed it — define design. In light of a recent increase in awareness of and enthusiasm for concepts of “design justice” as crystallized in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s 2020 publication of the same name, the definition of “design as community,” which this essay proposes, seems both timely and relevant.
Imagine this: you’re a designer, you’re in a room with another designer, then someone asks you both to define “design,” and they say you both get ice cream if you can agree on a definition. Can you do it?
Can anyone?
If you think you’re leaving with a definition of design, a belly full of ice cream, and a new friend, you are probably mistaken — designers have been debating the definition “design” for as long as the field has been formally defined! Muddying the waters — or perhaps melting the ice cream — of this ongoing debate is the fact that the word “design” can refer to several interconnected but different things:
- Design, a noun referring to the academic field or discipline of practice
- design, a noun referring to an object, instance, quality or manifestation
- design, a verb referring to the practice, process or method
Those of us who attempt to define design tend to lump all of these into a pile entitled Design with a capital D.
On one hand, some define Design so as to differentiate it from other fields of study. From this perspective, Design has its own, exclusive research questions, methodologies, and practices. In some cases, this suggests there are exclusive outcomes and impacts achievable only through Design, and only with the aid of a trained designer. On the other hand, others define Design more holistically. In the words of Nelson and Stolterman (2012, pp. 93–102), two of the holistic view’s main proponents, Design is a “emergent whole” or “holism.” According to this view, Design is merely the rearrangement of and connection between elements and other functional wholes from any number of fields into another holism, often limited temporally. (Yeah, I had to read Nelson & Stolterman more than once before I understood what they were talking about.)
My personal relationship with Design has allowed me to interact with and experience, first-hand, Design from these perspectives. Though I concede that these definitions accurately define portions or versions of Design, each on its own cannot define the whole of Design. Moreover, they miss an important aspect that goes beyond design academics, instances of design or design practice — one can define Design as a noun referring to community. Design community connects me to former, current and future designers and non-designers alike. Although some might object to defining design as community, I would reply that including community in its definition is important because it expands Design’s ability to be inclusive of design nouns and verbs found in interdisciplinary and extra-disciplinary fields rather than be exclusive.
Undergraduate Design — looking beyond objects into sustainability
During my undergraduate design education at The Ohio State University, following a brief stint in engineering, I received a full dose of industrial design. The program’s founders defined Design as both “any systematic and creative planning endeavor wherein a problem is isolated and a solution is sought” (Gysler, Jones, & Wallschlaeger, 1972, p. 5) and an interdisciplinary, “structured body of praxeological knowledge” (ibid., p. 6). These definitions manifested in the classes I took. Some classes taught me methods for identifying and defining problems, from simple quantitative market surveys to elaborate qualitative persona building. Other classes taught me the basics and importance of craft. The design studio courses afforded me opportunities to incorporate methods from other disciplines with which I was familiar, including engineering and business.
Design can also be defined as making things while considering the broader systems impacts of doing so.
My professors, who had clearly expanded upon the apparent mass-market focus from the department’s founders, additionally exposed my cohort to the concept of sustainable design. Cradle to Cradle was required reading that hammered home this expanded view of Design, with authors McDonough and Braungart charging designers with the responsibility to consider the bigger ecological impacts of Design. They discuss the current “cradle-to-grave” cycle of which Design is a part, and propose techniques for a more sustainable “cradle-to-cradle” approach to Design. In other words, I learned that although Design can be defined as making things, it can also be defined as making things while considering the broader systems impacts of doing so.
Professional practice and disillusionment — design for the landfill
By the Spring of 2010, I was a newly minted Industrial Designer equipped with at least two broad definitions of Design to apply in practice — and so I did. For seven years I faithfully executed on one of those definitions, Design as the OSU Department of Design founders would have wanted: I worked with users to identify human factors and ergonomics issues and define usability problems; I partnered with marketing teams to identify gaps and opportunities for new products; I used iterative sketching and prototyping to prove concepts had functional merit, further refining and optimizing them for mass-manufacture with engineers. As these products made their way into the marketplace, I was able to glimpse their existence as “functional wholes” within vast and complex retail and distribution systems, value chains, and user experiences. From this vantage point, I could see Design as what Nelson and Stolterman would describe as a “holism” in The Design Way. This view was scary, and I became disillusioned with Design.
This view was scary, and I became disillusioned with Design … I would need to rethink my role as a designer and seek another definition for Design.
Although the definitions of Design from Ohio State and The Design Way seemed to hold true for my design practice, viewing my work holistically left me unable to affect sustainable impact as described in Cradle to Cradle — the wholes weren’t as functional as I had originally considered. If fact, the vast majority of the things that I made depleted the earth of valuable resources and wound up in the landfills of the world by way of marginal, if enjoyable, experiences by wealthy American customers — entirely cradle-to-grave. It seemed to me that in order to apply all of my Design definitions and still make things, I would need to rethink my role as a designer and seek another definition for Design.
Design for empowerment — a new design purpose
My world of Design collided with the world of education when I met Kris Kling in early 2017. One could say we had both accumulated definitions of our respective disciplines, but they left us looking for ways to reconcile the difference between our definitions and our practice. We decided to put our brains and disciplines together and develop something socially answerable. As Norman Potter (2002) puts it in his work What is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages, “designing is itself an open question, and under which design decisions — and artefacts — must show themselves to be socially answerable.” Perhaps adding social answerability to my growing list of Design definitions would yield a new way forward, but where could we have an impact on society?
“Designing is itself an open question, and under which design decisions — and artefacts — must show themselves to be socially answerable.” — Norman Potter
Six months later, by the end of Summer 2017, the nonprofit Kris and I created — Local Tech Heroes — had successfully run two Design + Education programs in Columbus, Ohio. We had identified issues with Columbus’s current STEM (Science, Technology, Education and Math) education system, then designed a program that would modify the system to include students who were left out. The middle and high school aged students with whom we interacted — through the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Ohio — were applying design methodologies we taught to creative challenges defined using educational methodologies. Students began learning and growing in positive ways their parents and educators had not seen in previous STEM programming. This growth was something Kris and I originally identified as self-actualization, a term I am currently investigating in my graduate studies. Although Local Tech Heroes was socially answerable to these parents and teachers, it is ultimately socially answerable to the students as well, whose participation should be rewarded with quality educational experiences.
It would seem this project embraced social answerability from Potter and at least the systems impact portion of Cradle to Cradle. It also seemed to resonate with yet another definition of Design from Alain Findeli. In his 2001 paper, Findeli offers one such definition of Design to encompass system-level change (p.10):
A new logical structure of the design process is:
- Instead of a problem, we have: state A of a system;
- Instead of a solution, we have: state B of the system; and
- The designer and the user are part of the system (stakeholders).
Findeli argues the importance of this new logical structure, as it would allow for the expansion of design’s role to include non-physical solutions in a world that is increasingly non-physical. From the vantage point of Local Tech Heroes, it would seem this system-state view of Design holds true.
Design community — a surprise insight from Design 50
That last and most recent design project, Local Tech Heroes, was enough to push me past my disillusionment with Design, and lead me to ask questions about the intersection of Design and the concept of “empowerment.” These questions formed the foundation of my graduate studies in Design Research & Development starting Fall 2018. Much of the first six weeks of the program has caused me to reflect upon and contextualize my own work with respect to the work of others. And yet, not all of my personal experience has reinforced these definitions of Design. In fact, one key definition of Design has arisen that has so far been relatively unaddressed by my reading — the definition of Design as community.
One can define Design as a noun referring to community.
This idea came into full resolution during the Design 50 events at Ohio State during the first week of October, 2018. The Department of Design was celebrating its 50th anniversary with a number of events and activities, well-attended by departmental alumni. During the October 4 lecture and following panel discussion, several alumni paid tribute to their Design training even though they had “left Design” for leadership positions (Foust, Bill, et al., panel discussion, October 4, 2018). Others with whom I interacted during the following day’s “design crawl” tours and exhibition at the Urban Arts Space echoed this sentiment. Some communicated feelings of connectedness to their colleagues and clients over the years. When asked what it was they would attribute this connection to, although not everyone would put it in exactly the same words, “Design” was the answer. In other words, Design was connecting an intergenerational, interdisciplinary group of individuals, through time and space, and undoubtedly through varied personal definitions of Design.
Design as community — putting it all together
The weekend following the formal Design 50 events gave me an entire day of interactions with members of my own undergraduate cohort, the class of 2010, many of whom I had not seen for years. We shared stories of our own Design experiences, some reinforcing the 1972 departmental definition of Design, others reflecting more contemporary design definitions involving sustainability or social responsibility. One of my former classmates has pursued a career entirely unrelated to Design, but still feels a connection not only to her design classmates, but to their colleagues, clients and users as well. In other words, Design is community.
“Design is community” is not the same as a design community or professional organization like the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA); such communities have existed for nearly as long as the discipline, but many require membership available exclusively to designers. I mean to say Design is inherently community, as in a feeling of fellowship with others, a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. Maybe this results from a formal design education at Ohio State, but it seems to also arise from informal design experience, and even close proximity to design activities.
I can see how “Design is community” might rub Design scholars the wrong way because it does not differentiate Design from any other particular discipline, nor does it require a community member to be a trained or practicing designer, nor does it involve the creation or manipulation of matter at all! I do not suggest that community is an all-encompassing definition for Design, nor is it even a required component. Nonetheless, I am suggesting that my personal experience with the many aspects and definitions of Design has revealed community to be one indispensable definition. By including community in its definition, Design might continue to expand its inclusivity beyond traditional design nouns and verbs.
Design definitions often ooze pride and exclusivity. Perhaps by adding community — a noun that is naturally flexible and living — to the definitions of Design, we will retain and include those who have “left design” or never “joined design” in the first place. If we can expand the definition of Design to include so-called “non-designers,” like those Local Tech Heroes participants, without requiring membership in an unspoken Design club, it will allow the design discipline, the profession, and the academic worlds to move past the old definitions and focus on something more.
What’s more, you ask? Sounds like a great conversation to have over some ice cream.
References.
Community | Define Community at Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2018, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/community
Gysler, R., Jones, S., & Wallschlaeger, C. (1972) A Rationale and structure for the discipline of industrial design with implications for product, visual communication and space and enclosure design execution. A Prospectus for the Faculty of the Division, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Findeli, A. (2001). Rethinking design education for the 21st century: Theoretical, methodological, and ethical discussion. Design Issues, 17(1), 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1162/07479360152103796
McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things. North Point Press.
Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The design way: Intentional change in an unpredictable world. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9188.001.0001
Potter, N. (2002). What is a designer: Things, places, messages. Hyphen.
