September 26, 2007 Designery Thing of the Day
Is “design” more like invention, or more like decoration?
According to Wikipedia, “to design” refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component. That sounds more like invention to me.
But then you have Michael Beirut bringing up the other side:
Perhaps design is the field of mindless prettiness. But hasn’t it always been so? After all, most of us entered the profession not because we’ve determined after long thought that it represented a more effective way of influencing the course of world events than, say, law or medicine. Instead, somewhere along the way, we discovered we liked making things look good, and that we were better at it than other people.
(I won’t lie, this quote threw me for a bit of a loop. And it’s funny, if I did “become a designer”, his not-reason would be exactly why.)
Or is it just that they’re using the word design to mean two very different things?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
After reading this, the Wikipedia entry, and Beirut’s article, it began to haunt the back of my mind. So please, bear with me if this turns into a bit of a ramble.
I think the Wikipedia article best sums up the overarching nature of design as “the management of constraints.” I think design, at it’s core, almost always means the same thing; Attempting to arrive at a solution that adheres to the given constraints. Using the word ’solution’ implies the existence of a problem, but I’m being incredibly loose with the definition of ‘problem’ and using it as more of a ‘desire’. The difference between “mindless prettiness” (art is significantly serendipitous, but I can hardly call it mindless) and things like “process design,” is the form to which the design is being applied.
If we are to believe that making things “look good” is entirely separate from influencing the course of world events, does that entirely discount the intellectual attractiveness of elegant solutions? Does a harmonious process not resemble a melody produced by the unification of a complex symphony into a simple whole? The question then, is were does design fall in relationship to art? I’d like to think that design is the application of abstract creativity to solve problems from any arena of human understanding.
At this point my brain is entering a nebulous inner space, shooting the tendrils of this thought process into other areas in a desperate attempt to bring in tangents, analogies, and various other digressions that need not come into this. To sum it up with the conclusion I seem to have reached: The differentiation between areas of design is in the application, but it is never a non-creative endeavor.
Comment by Tom — September 27, 2007 @ 1:42 am