Last semester, one of my students asked me the blunt question of what a designer entering the field today should study. While this is, in a way, the implicit question asked by design school itself, no one had ever really put it to me point blank. At the time, all I had to offer was a half-formed concoction of Swiss books and Photoshop tutorials that smelled vaguely of dishonesty. But the question stuck with me, because when you’re teaching a design class, it’s filled mostly with people who expect that they may work in design. This is fundamentally unlike teaching a course in, say, philosophy. While it’s debatable whether this vocational orientation is a good thing, it is the reality of the situation today, and as such I believe that design instructors have an important responsibility to accurately represent – and perhaps to impart – the knowledge a design student will need to operate as a designer. Yet my student's simple question, cutting as it does to the core of design, has in recent years become progressively more difficult to answer.

Once the exclusive realm of clever people who could draw well, design is now considerably more diffuse and inclusive. We see it portrayed as synonymous with “innovation;” it is both a profession and a process. “Design thinking” is applied to everything from business strategy to international development. The stark, narrow gates of design have been ratcheted open, and the winding semi-bohemian roads that once led there have been straightened and multiplied considerably. While this is an exciting time for established designers to explore the field's freshly unearthed possibilities, design has become a slippery subject to study. Students are understandably torn between learning the specific technical skills and the abstract “high level” approaches that represent the industry’s frontiers. I believe this reflects a broader problem of self-definition in the industry; essentially our inability to effectively answer what makes this new breed of high-level designer different from a business consultant or just a general problem-solver. Our schools will set the tone for design tomorrow, and as such, we can use design education as framework in which we examine these questions. We owe my student, and ourselves, a good answer.

What There is to Know

I’ll spare you the Webster’s definition of the word “design,” but it’s worth spending a little time up front defining what we’re really talking about when we speak of the expanded context of design. Herbert Simon, in Sciences of the Artificial, provides the simple definition that design is the "transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones."¹ That works, but on its own allows for the inclusion of anything from housecleaning to human courtship. Drawing a few more contours around Simon’s definition, we can say that – even if we don’t know what design is becoming – it is fundamentally a process of problem solving, rooted in the creation of new, useful . . . stuff. Norman Potter, writing in 1969, offers three main theaters for design: product design (things); environmental design (places); and communication design (messages).² While we have added new categories since, such as interaction design, it’s worthwhile to realize that this very physical reality of production is where design was hatched, in terms of its ideology and its methods. Design thinking began with people trying to make better objects, better posters to advertise them, and better stores to sell them in.

From these challenges, designers forged a set of methods aimed at turning the constraints inherent to production into advantages. The design process includes useful methods of gathering input, harvesting and testing hypotheses, keeping a schedule moving while allowing for new ideas to germinate, and deciding which ideas have the greatest fitness for production. These methods are commonly strung together to form the research, ideate, prototype, iterate, refine cycle, enshrined in a million PowerPoints, and certainly part of design’s core intellectual property.

Then, in the nineties, developed economies began to shift away from actual production of things to the production of services and ideas. Design, with its roots in the production of physical stuff, began to seek a broader context. While this shift was immediately (and still) a source of angst, the profession was undoubtedly helped. Design, it seems, is good for producing innovation not only in bathroom products and websites, but also (with varying degrees of success) in business’ more abstract realms, like leadership and strategy. In this new, idea-driven economy, one can’t open an issue of BusinessWeek without reading about the critical importance innovation plays in setting companies apart. While it may be uncomfortable to state bluntly, design has become the great differentiator, denoting a position of power as production goes overseas. Companies in the US and Europe are understandably desperate to maintain their place, while fast-rising countries like China and Korea are investing heavily in educating their own indigenous crop of designers. Given this situation, we look to prove value by “designing” or “innovating” pretty much any process we’d like to keep. Much like designer jeans, we now have designer leadership and management. It’s not uncommon today to find many non-design companies espousing the values and techniques of user-centered design, eager to make “design thinking” a part of the permanent company culture.

Business and design have been seen together everywhere as of late, seemingly having a great time. Design has long been the bedfellow of commerce, but the relationship has recently undergone a fundamental shift: a recognition of the surprising similarities between great business thinking and standard design practices. As a friend of mine prepared to go to a design leadership seminar at Harvard Business School over the summer (further evidence of collusion), I had the pleasure of reading through a few of the case studies they planned to discuss. From Benihana to Black and Decker, the case studies set up a business problem from the familiar standpoint of advantages and constraints, then looked at potential solutions for brand, product, and digital touchpoints. Example: Benihana’s popularity owed a great deal to the authenticity of its staff and environment (restaurants made from disassembled Japanese farmhouses), yet this same authenticity presented a problem in matters of scalability. Black and Decker, while a hit with the soccer moms, wasn’t taken seriously at all by construction workers, necessitating the radically redesigned (and re-colored) DeWalt spin-off, now almost ubiquitous on construction sites. Much like any creative client brief, business problems are problems of production, perception, and resources. Designers are naturally enmeshed in commerce throughout the course of their work and often use the same financial metrics for design’s success. frog’s own “Bottom Line Design Awards” takes into account not only the beauty of an object, but also how successful it is in the market – reflecting the founders’ belief that the merit of design is measured by both aesthetic and commercial standards. Design thinking and creative business thinking are essentially lost siblings, raised by different parents, but bearing every evidence of kinship.

Design methodologist J. Christopher Jones describes this new context of opportunities within a tiered structure, with the traditional “components and products” on the lowest level of design, and “system-level problems” and “community-level problems” towards the peak.³ Among these, he positions system-level problems as the main charge of design in a postindustrial society – and indeed, there are many substantial, real, and relevant issues in these higher-order challenges for which design is perfectly suited. But now that we’re standing on Potter’s shoulders, it may be worthwhile to review his fundamental definition of design. “The difficulty,” Potter writes of defining our industry, “becomes acute if the word ‘design’ is used without reference to any specific context – used, for instance, as a blanket term to cover every situation in which adaptation of means to ends is preceded by an abstract or intent.”⁴

In straining design to new frontiers, are we at risk of losing what Potter called that “specific context” that holds the whole thing together? Has design become too expansive an idea to understand, to develop, to maintain?