This is a classic question asked to students who are newly enrolled into design courses. Ever so often, designers stop thinking about this fundamental question as we go through our design processes project after project.

We know what we need to do as designers. Really?

To me, answering this basic question of “What is Design?” help me to consider the appropriate approach to produce a desirable outcome of the design process. Defining the design approach is necessary to help the clients and general public see how Design can play a part in helping them to achieve business goals or addressing user needs.

Design as an activity to organise

Dictionaries and encyclopedias tried to answer this question by giving a variety of contexts. One context that is commonly understood is how Design as a process or activity can generate an outcome with a curated set of aesthetic qualities. So when we tell someone we are designers, people would think that our main job is to make things look good. There are more action-based way to describe “Design”, such as the activity to arrange visual elements such as dots, lines, shapes and forms for a decorative purpose, which then facilitates the expectation or assumption of “It is a given that a designer has good colour sense and can draw”. The equivalent of such action-based way to describing “Design” is the activity to arrange components in a structural way with guiding principles, such as in engineering design or policy design.

Design Philosophies beyond Design History

Just in the arena of product design, there are many design philosophies which layers over the fundamental definition of what Design does. For example, “Less is More”, “Form follows Function”, etc. Design History lessons often cover these topics as a “good to know”, but hardly challenges design freshmen to consider why defining a design philosophy for which they use to guide their design approach can make a difference in how they define and approach design problems.

There is a second layer of meaning to “Design”, when instead of putting Aesthetics as the end goal, we intend for the aesthetic scheme to be the means to an end–effective delivery of an intended message/service. This has always been the case for visual communication design and product design. The choice of visual elements, materials and composition is strategically made in the hope to optimise the delivery of the intended message or service. Research and experiments are necessary to explore and determine the guiding principles.

When we acknowledge that Aesthetics is just one of the many means to the end goal of delivering an intended message or service which Design can create, we can also see how Design Thinking can become a possible framework for problem solving. From the emergence of the “Wicked Problems” concept and “Design Science Revolution” in the 1960s to “Design Thinking” (first used as a book title by Peter Rowe in 1987), Design is packaged in Design Thinking as a repeatable formula to finding solutions for complex issues. With an executable process and even tools for the various stages, Design thinking is preached as being trainable and usable for non-design trained individuals. It is not uncommon for companies to embark on Design Thinking Workshops and training to help their staff become Design Thinkers.

How then, as product designers, user experience specialists, or design thinking facilitators, do we provide enough differentiating values to our clients, so that they appreciate and reward us for our professionalism, instead of making design studios pitch design solutions free, set unrealistically low, cut-throat design project budgets, and make us answerable to the failure of their half-baked “How Might We?” design questions?

Going back to asking ourselves “What is Design?” may help us to consider what values our “Design” can bring to the clients. It can also help us to assess and convince clients to provide ample resources for proper research, craft the appropriate design question and co-design the solution with us.

In trying to achieve the end goal of the design project, Design Thinking practitioners and designers often consult applied knowledges such as Psychology and Behavioural Insight. The next aspect of “What is Design?” which we sometimes overlooked is: Does our Design solution merely provide sufficient useful, meaningful cues and options to the users (in the form of affordance and nudges) or is pushing the boundary of manipulating the users (by conditioning them)? Design practice has to be ethical to be trustable and sustainable.

Design and Creativity: Are Critical Thinking and Creativity mutually-exclusive?

There is yet another layer of meaning associated with “Design”: The expression of creativity. If you ask people to quote an example of a creative activity, it is quite common for people to mention “Design” as one. Creative Thinking is often been associated with Design Thinking. Is being labelled as “Creative” an important, default quality for designers? To what extend do we consider the design solution a creative outcome? Can “Creativity” be taught? These are some extended questions which we can also consider as we try to find our own answer of “What is Design?”.

But how do we define “Creativity”? Creative solutions are sometimes, if not often, being labelled as radical solutions. However, Designers will argue that our design solution, regardless of how pragmatically or radically their original ideas may be conceived or inspired, would have gone through rigorous critical assessment and selection throughout the concept development stage. Thus, my view is that Critical Thinking is an essential part of the Design process. Creativity of a design solution is not a function of radical or unconventional inputs. The creative solution may be a new interpretation of an age-old method, it may also be a totally new creation made possible through new technology and favourable economical conditions. Thus Creativity is also not a function of originality. Creative solution, in my own opinion, can be loosely defined as a way to solve a problem brilliantly. A Design process if properly executed, can produce a creative solution. And since the Design process involve critical thinking, I can say that Critical Thinking and Creativity are not mutually-exclusive.

There is probably no standard answer to the question of “What is Design?”, but it is still an essential question to ask ourselves, because to be able to design, we need to be clear why we are designing and decide how we are going to design.