What is design?

Last night, I had a dream.

In this dream, myself and a colleague (a real Griffin McElroy-looking type) had been contracted to do design work for an organisation.

What this organisation actually did wasn’t stated, but it was large, and as we made our way through multiple rooms and corridors on the way to the marketing manager’s office, we passed through many fleeting conversations where this manager pressed people for “design point” estimates of what they were doing.

(This included a group of three 10-year-olds with a film camera, supposedly filming an advert for the organisation. The director talked like a smooth-talking Hollywood bigwig. It was weird.)

Upon getting to the manager’s office, where apparently we would be working, we set down at some available desk space and started unpacking our laptops.

There’s no such thing as a ‘design point’, you know, I said.

The manager looked up indignantly. Well, how am I supposed to know how much ‘weight’ something is, otherwise? I’m not a designer, I work in marketing.

Well there’s your problem. I responded.

Behind the manager and out of his sight, not-Griffin chortled silently.

I asked the manager, What do you think design is?

It’s making something look pretty, he said.

This is when I went off.

Design is not ‘making something look pretty’. Design is creating the perfect interweaving of both form and function, that is iterated upon based on testing with actual users.

And no, user testing is not asking a handful of people if they think it looks good; it’s putting people in actual usage scenarios and observing what problems they encounter while trying to complete it.

You could craft the most beautiful door handle out of the most luxurious materials, but if the door can only be pushed and not pulled, you’ve failed to design it properly, because no one needed a handle to be there.

The needs of the organisation and the needs of users are constantly evolving. Design is a never-ending process, it isn’t a one-and-done job.

The dream ended at that point, with me waking up suddenly at five in the morning. Not exactly the most interesting of dreams, but damn, dream beeps is apparently keeping some exasperated monologues about the nature of art and design in the chamber.

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