Defining the design process

I’m willing to go on a lim and presume that at least once in your lifetime you’ve asked yourself this very question : “What is design?” Especially all you designers who, I’m sure it was more than often you had to answer the question : “How do you define what you do?”.

Available definitions of design are varied, complex, contradictory and tightly connected to the concepts of consumerism, lifestyle, popular culture and marketing in their early stages. However, design is determined by the outside forces that have, and still are shaping it, forces that are mainly driven by human interaction.

Taking in consideration the nature, the process and the outcome of the design process, I’ve split design process into 3 categories :

Design as a shared activity

It’s safe to say that everybody has assumed a definition and made it his own. And this is exactly what constitutes the beauty of it all : there is no “right way”.
More than often one plus one equals three in design. That has an extremely simple explanation : human interaction. Doesn’t make any sense ? Let’s take an example : in mathematics, in order to add up 2 natural numbers, first you’d have to define an array of numbers with a set of defined operations with a strict set of rules (in our case (N,+)). In design, this doesn’t apply. The rules change continuously due to human behaviour, perception, personality, social environment and interaction. These factors create problems, thus leading me to define design as a problem-solving process.

Wherever there are people there are problems needing solutions. This is where the process of design begins. Yet, design has not always been a associated with the term “problem-solving”. Up until the Great War ideeas were explored in an unilateral and individual way: a simple problem has a simple solution. With the Bauhaus movement, the design process became a coherent whole where interaction and social behaviour defined design as a shared activity.

Design as a rational, logical and sequential process

No matter the area of design, may it be graphic, industrial, interior, web, typografic and so on, a designer must always undergo an universal sequential process : research, analysis, strategy, creation and implementation. But if we think in terms of the outcome, this process can be broken down into 3 simple elements : a line, a color and an image. These are the elements primarily used to communicate, and how Hillman Curtis used to put it : “God is in the details.”

Design is now considered to be a condition that certain objects are deemed to possess because people always expressed themselves through their possessions. In order to achieve that condition, the design process must include 3 main functions : purposeful (the ability to satisfy the functional, psychological, and aesthetic needs of users.), systematic (the analysis of problems in our physical environment, and the transformation of findings into appropriate and usable solutions) and creative (the expertise to create compelling visual forms for products, spaces, and information systems).

Design as an Artifact

The design process results in producing design artifacts, which include various system models, design specifications, style guides, prototypes, environments and spaces.
The more inclusive notion of design focuses on the qualities of the finished artifact in order to achieve an universal goal : to communicate. Sounds simple, doesn’t it ? The implied effects and consequences of communication are far to complex as to cover them in this article.

All these results are visible as an obvious outcome of the design process. But there is also one invisible outcome that is at least as crucial as the process itself: functionality. I included functionality as a design artifact, because the designer has the opportunity to communicate a message through design as well as through function.

Having these said, I hope at least some aspects of the design process have been cleared and I can’t think of a better way to conclude this article but to quote Paul Rand : “Everything is design. Everything!”