A question that doesn’t seem to have one right answer. Maybe that is a good thing and maybe that is a bad thing. Either way, it is a question that you should ask yourself if you are involved in the process of design. It doesn’t matter if you are the actual designer or you are the person that employs the person doing the design, design is important and if you are going to be part of the process you have to understand your own idea of it.

What is design to me? Like design I think it’s best to break the problem up until you find the simplest solution. So to answer the question maybe it’s best to take a design approach to it. This might mean looking at what others are saying about design. You can see how people responded to the question on Twitter to the right. The Wikipedia definition of design of course doesn’t keep things as simple as a 140 character response.

Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system.

Wikipedia

That sounds like the engineer’s definition of design.

Now that we have what everyone else feels design involves, lets see what else the problem involves. The design of a website contains the information architecture, colors, white space, typography and resolution. So is design information architecture? Is design colors? Of course web design involves all of these so you can say that each of these falls under the umbrella of design. However, there has to be a better answer than simply listing what can be shown on a webpage.

When looking at a physical object that you like, what aspect of its design draws you to it?

I love the design of the Apple iPod as do many people I’m sure. What do I like about it? I like the curves. I like the screen. I like the way you interact with the iPod via its dial. So from this we could say that design is how we interact with something. Maybe design is how we interact with a product or how an object interacts with its environment. However, I feel that design means more than that.

Digging even deeper we sometimes like the way something is designed because it is easy to work with. Making something easy to use is a by-product of great design. We don’t like to think too hard to solve a problem. Nature is the greatest problem solver of all. Looking at a plant, every piece of it can be justified. Nothing is extraneous, everything serve its purpose. Are all plants aesthetically pleasing? I don’t think so, but to me aesthetics is an opinion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say.

Going back to the iPod example, what many people love about the iPod is that it solves the problems of storing large amounts of music and listening to it in an intuitive fashion. Although for some features, like turning it off you might have to read the manual, the overall usage of an iPod is pretty easy. They say the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B is a straight line and in many ways the iPod’s design encourages that. So in this case maybe we can say that design is the process of finding the quickest way to complete a task.

What about emotion?

The main issue is that emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world, and how they learn new things. For example: aesthetically pleasing objects appear to the user to be more effective, by virtue of their sensual appeal. This is due to the affinity the user feels for an object that appeals to him, due to the formation of an emotional connection [with the object].

Wikipedia

If you take this into account, is design the ability to evoke emotions from the person interacting with it? It can be, but in nature rarely are there emotions used when one object is interacting with another. The design of how humans breathe has nothing to do with our emotions, although I’m sure we would all be sad if we lost the ability to do so. I believe that trying to evoke an emotion in some designs is very important, but it is not essential and as I have already stated emotional design isn’t included in all design.

Now we don’t have to worry about including emotions in the definition of design, but that doesn’t mean we should forget the important role that emotion plays in the designs that we create daily.

The Answer

Now that I have established some guidelines of what I feel design does and doesn’t include I can come up with a better definition of what design is to me.

Design is the process of finding the most elegant answer to the question of ‘how do I?’

Paul Scrivens

How do I ensure the Twitter responses on the right are visually separate enough so that the reader can easily scan them? How do I create an article layout that encourages the reader to actually want to read the whole article? How do I open this door? How do I get oxygen into my lungs?

You can have a number of answers to each question, but one answer will be more elegant than the rest. One answer will be the simplest solution. You might not get to that answer the first time around, but that is why we redesign. Don’t redesign just to do something new, redesign because you have a better answer to the question.

Is my answer the correct answer to the question of what is design? I have no idea, but I know it makes perfect sense to me and it’s the answer that helps guide me whenever I start a new task. Don’t hesitate to really think about the answer yourself, you may be surprised at what you come up with.