What is design

Design is everywhere - and that's why looking for a definition may not help you grasp what it is.

Design is everywhere. It's what drew you to the last piece of furniture you bought and it's what made online banking possible. It's made London taxi cabs easier to get in and out of and it made Stella McCartney's name. It's driving whole business cultures and making sure environments from hospitals to airports are easier to navigate.

The single word 'design' encompasses an awful lot, and that's why the understandable search for a single definition leads to lengthy debate to say the least.There are broad definitions and specific ones - both have drawbacks. Either they're too general to be meaningful or they exclude too much.

One definition, aired by designer Richard Seymour during the Design Council's Design i Business Week 2002, is 'making things better for people'. It emphasises that design activity is focused first and foremost on human behaviour and quality of life, not factors like distributor preferences. But nurses or road sweepers could say they, too, 'make things better for people'.

Meanwhile, a definition focused on products or 3D realisations of ideas excludes the work of graphic designers, service designers and many other disciplines. There may be no absolute definitions of design that will please everyone, but attempting to find one can at least help us pin down the unique set of skills that designers bring to bear.

Translation

Design could be viewed as an activity that translates an idea into a blueprint for something useful, whether it's a car, a building, a graphic, a service or a process. The important part is the translation of the idea, though design's ability to spark the idea in the first place shouldn't be overlooked.

Scientists can invent technologies, manufacturers can make products, engineers can make them function and marketers can sell them, but only designers can combine insight into all these things and turn a concept into something that's desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people's lives. There are many misconceptions about design

Design is a work process which has a user perspective and drives development based on your specific customers’ needs.

Methods and approaches differ depending on what you are developing but whether that involves processes in the healthcare sector or product development at a company we can say with certainty that design will help you to find new solutions.

Amazing Ideas That Will Make Your House Awesome

We’ve all got some sort of idea of how our dream home might look. Some of us have just got to have a pool, while others want clever modern design, sustainability, or integration with natural elements. No matter what it is that makes your dream home unique, here are a few examples of homes where people have been able to real ideas of their greatest home design fantasies.

Chandelier That Turns Your Room into a Forest

Aquarium Bed

Indoor-Outdoor Pool

These ingenious home improvements run from pools and aquariums to cleverly-hidden storage spaces, multi-purpose furniture and… cat transit walkways. Maybe you’ll recognize something that you’ve always wanted to see, or maybe the pictures will get your juices flowing and inspire you to come up with or even build something new.

Warning – viewing some of these images may make you feel dissatisfied with your current home!

Ping pong door

Pool table

Spiral Staircase Slide

Understairs Storage

swing table set

Why is design important?

Design is first and foremost a philosophy, based on a system of values, which seeks to solve problems.

What are we creating? Why and for whom? Are we correctly framing the problem to be solved? These are the questions to which the answers are then manifested tangibly in the form of a new product, service or business model.

Human-centered design approaches the task of problem solving by always seeking to understand the end-user’s needs and aspirations, goals and the environmental conditions and constraints in which they live. When we can design a product or solution that meets an unmet need or challenge successfully that becomes good design.

These qualities are what make design a powerful tool for not only increasing value for corporations but also benefiting their customers by providing elegant yet effective products, services and business models. Often the biggest challenge is to identify the real problem that must be solved, this where using design research methods and tools can help businesses at their early stage strategic planning.

Design thinking in business takes this problem solving aspect one step further. Now the tools and techniques from the field of design such as ethnographic research, rapid prototyping and conceptual brainstorming integrate with the pragmatic business frameworks of strategy, analysis and metrics to create and provide roadmaps for business innovation and competitive advantage.

In this context, design has evolved away from traditional form giving to becoming an integral part of corporate strategy.

How and where can it be applied?

When you’re looking for new market opportunities – You know your company’s strengths and are looking for inspiration and insights for innovation within your existing product line or think there might be a new product category you’d like to explore. You know the market opportunity you want to target, such as “seniors or youth market” or “wish to expand to a new culture or country ” but need help to define the product or product category that would allow you to take maximum advantage of this opportunity.

Or when your business is facing a very specific challenge, but doesn’t really know why and needs to take a look not only at their products and services but their business system to see what can be tweaked. Often companies who need an innovative new product concept to become a global design “hit” will face this fuzzy problem.

This is where design tools such as exploratory research and insights can lead to clear articulation of opportunity spaces and as yet unmet consumer needs, communicating visually through concept sketches as well as creating a strong business case for a particular design direction by supporting market analyses and metrics.

Design has the tools for visualizing complex large scale systems and the insights thus derived can be applied to improving the quality of the customer’s experience, improve the efficiency of the process and offer benefits across the spectrum of applications. For example, the UK has hired a senior designer to help improve the patient experience and the processes at the National Health Service.

Bringing design’s empathy and user centered approach to process innovation adds intangible value to systems which were otherwise focused on efficiency and profits alone.

What is industrial design?

There are also all kinds of people who do design as part of a role or job that has a different name. For instance, all engineers design – design is a part of their process. Most business people design too. They design research objectives, brainstorm new ideas, design strategies and plans, and contribute to teams that include the design specialists listed above. Great design usually happens in teams, so no matter what you end up doing in your life, it’s smart to be tuned into design, to understand the design process and how to use it in your professional life to make things more meaningful for users.

What Designers Do
The second thing to know about design is - what designers do.
Over time, designers develop the unique capacity to effectively use creative and analytical processes to solve different kinds of problems in new ways. They use the imaginative parts of their brains to envision solutions no one has thought of before, and they use the systematic parts of their brains to analyze and refine their ideas to make them better and better. Driven by a strong desire to innovate, designers engage in a continuous creative problem solving cycle of “learn, think, do.”

Looking at what a designer does from a process perspective, designers:

Help define the problem they are solving by researching and learning about the people who use the product or service, their needs and goals.
Brainstorm and create lots of possible ways to solve the problem.
Sketch, illustrate, diagram or find some other way to communicate their ideas visually (as well as verbally).
Build prototypes to see if their ideas work; sometimes they are rough models made from stuff laying around the house or office; sometimes they are nice graphics printed from your computer; sometimes they are storyboards like in comic books – describing the way something happens; sometimes they are computer models or animations; and sometimes they are fancy hand-built or machine-built models.
Test their ideas with the people the design is meant to serve to see if they like it and to see if they can find ways to improve it.
Refine their design until it is ready to develop further, sometimes working with engineering specialists, manufacturing specialists or business specialists.

Some of these terms or practices may be unfamiliar or seem difficult to imagine yourself doing right now, but it’s really important to remember that design is a process that you learn over time. And like with most things; the more you practice, the better you get.