• Design as “a plan”
  • Product of plan can be material or immaterial
    (i.e. systems, activities)
  • Product of plan must be material
    (i.e. seen, touched or heard)
• Design as “an applied art”
  where design is an applied art or has a strong visual component
• Design as somewhere in-between
  where design is not as broad as “a plan” and not as narrow
  as “applied art”

 

Design as “a plan”

Product of design can be material or immaterial

“No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.” ~ Bruce Mau, 2007

“Design is the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes.” ~ Richard Buchanan, 2001

“design is the purposeful organization of resources to accomplish a goal.” ~ Hevner et al., 2004

“‘Design’— a noun referring to a specification or plan for making a particular artefact or for undertaking a particular activity. A distinction is drawn here between a design and an artifact — a design is the basis for, and precursor to, the making of an artefact.” “‘Designing’—human activity leading to the production of a design.” ~ Terence Love, 2002

“Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order…. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it.” ~ Victor Papanek, 1971

“Design is, in its most general educational sense, defined as the area of human experience, skill and understanding that reflects man’s concern with the appreciation and adaptation in his surroundings in the light of his material and spiritual needs.” ~ Bruce Archer, 1979

“Design is devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” ~ Herbert Simon, 1969

“1 a : a particular purpose held in view by an individual or group <he has ambitious designs for his son> b
: deliberate purposive planning <more by accident than design> 2 : a mental project or scheme in which means to an end are laid down” ~ Merriam-Webster [noun], 2006

Product of plan must be material

A design is a plan to make something: something we can see or hold or walk into; something that is twodimensional or three-dimensional, and sometimes in the time dimension. It is always something seen and
sometimes something touched, and now and then by association, something heard.” ~ Partners of Pentagram, 1978

“The process of inventing physical things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function.” ~ Alexander (1964)

Design as “an applied art”
Where design is considered an applied art, or has a strong visual component

“[A designer] is a planner with an aesthetic sense.” ~ Bruno Munari, 1966

“Design is a general term, comprising all aspects of organization in the visual arts.” ~ Richardson, 1984

“The term ‘design’ broadly embraces the whole orbit of man-made, visible surroundings, from simple everyday goods to the complex pattern of a whole town” ~ Walter Gropius, 1947

“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”  ~ Paul Rand, 2001

Design as somewhere in-between
Where design is not as broad as “a plan” and not as narrow as “applied art”

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” ~ Tim Brown, president and CEO IDEO

 

Sources

About IDEO. (n.d.). IDEO. Retrieved March 5, 2011, from http://www.ideo.com/about/

Association of Canadian Industrial Designers. (2006). What is Industrial Design. ACID. Retrieved March 8, 2011, from http://www.designcanada.org/what-is-ID.html

Alexander, C.W. (1964). Notes on the synthesis of form. Harvard University Press.

Buchanan, R. (2001). Design Research and the New Learning. Design Issues, 17(4), 3-23.

Design (noun). (n.d.). In Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved February 22, 2011, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/design

Gropius, W. (1956). Scope of Total Architecture. London: Allen and Unwin.

Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J., Ram, S.: Design science in information systems research. MIS Quarterly 28(1), 75–105 (2004)

International Council of Graphic Design Associations. (2007). Defining the professions. ICOGRADA. Retrieved March 8, 2011, from http://www.icograda.org/about/about/articles836.htm

Jungkind, W. & Roussell, Y. (2006). Graphic Design – Definition. Society of Graphic Designers Canada. Retrieved May 3, 2009, from http://www.gdc.net/designers/features/articles122.php

Krippendorff, Klaus (2006). The Semantic Turn; A New Foundation for Design. Boca Raton, London, New York: Taylor&Francis, CRC Press.

Love, T. (2002). Constructing a coherent body of theory about designing and designs: some philosophical issues. Design Studies, 23(3), 345-361.

Mau, Bruce. (2007). “What is Massive Change?” Massive Change. Retrieved February 12, 2007 from: http://www.massivechange.com/about/.

Papanek, V. J. (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Chicago, Ill.

P. Ralph, & Y. Wand. (2009). A Proposal for a Formal Definition of the Design Concept. In Lyytinen, K., Loucopoulos, P., Mylopoulos, J., & Robinson, B. (Eds.), Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective (Vol. 14, 103–136). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Rand, P. (2001). In Maeda@Media, Ed. John Maeda, Universe Press.

Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.