Design Education

Design, specific plans, drawings, or instructions that contain all the necessary information for the manufacture of a product, process, or system. Design can also refer to the particular physical embodiment of a product or device. Additionally, the term can mean the process of converting generalized ideas and concepts into a design as defined above.

“Design” as both a noun and verb is a popular, and often misused, term for a wide range of activities and outcomes. It can be both process and product. The difficulty of defining “design” is compounded by fashion and trends. The more popular it becomes, the more it seems to be applied to new activities and outcomes, not always correctly, in order to convey messages of quality, value, status, inventiveness, exclusivity, skill, and modernity. One may refer to the design of supersonic aircraft, mobile phones, art works, television programmes, new cities, computer software, jewellery, clothing, food, packaging, and signs. The list could take up several pages—even the outputs on the way to these finished products (the sketches and prototypes) can be considered as designs.

Design activity has had a significant impact on society and culture. Its relationship with mass production has brought design into the homes of people around the world in the form of tools, television, furnishings, consumer goods, and toiletries, among other things. The 20th century saw a dramatic increase in the number of people who earn a living from the professional practice of design. Today, designers can be found occupying prestigious posts in many areas of the manufacturing and service industries, particularly where products need to meet the varied preferences and needs of a mass market. Increasingly, designers are employed in information design, where the products are digital and delivered to homes, workplaces, and mobile phones via computer technology. Games, Web resources, and services are challenging consumer artefacts as the main subjects of design today.

Designing is a process that helps us to be critical of the world as we find it and to do something to change it. It takes us from “what is” to “what might be”. Designing is a process of deliberate intervention and at a simple level we all do it. Expert design requires an ability to combine knowledge and skills with motivation. Clearly there needs to be expertise in the specialist field, which might be rooted in the arts, material sciences, human sciences, and so on; there needs to be skills of an investigative or creative nature; and there needs to be motivation, which might vary from a personal motivation to a salary. Design is sometimes referred to as a problem-solving activity. This is an error, because very rarely can a definitive answer to a design problem be provided. Design problems do not lend themselves to being “solved”. Design is a process of resolving complex and often conflicting factors, where defining the problem can be as difficult as generating ideas.

Most professional design tasks begin with a brief. The brief outlines, from the client's point of view, the job to be undertaken, with its parameters and timescale. It enables focused discussion to take place between various specialists, and a redefinition of the brief often results after a period of investigation. Many innovative products have resulted from creative interpretation of design briefs. Marketing data, analyses of competing products, and ergonomic research may all contribute to the articulation of a brief.

Designers tend to progress through a series of stages in which the solution (or a number of options) is progressively defined with increasing levels of detail. The design process contains sequences of iterative (repetitive) cycles of activities. The construction of tentative proposals is followed by testing, modifying, testing again, and so on. It is for this reason that industrial designers make so many models. Design ideas are quickly modelled in two dimensions (by drawing and sketching) and in three dimensions (in various materials). Such models facilitate examination and evaluation by other specialists, by managers, or even by the public (in special “user trials”), as well as by the design team. Following this sketch modelling, further material, costing, or production research is incorporated into the creative development in order to assess the feasibility of the most promising ideas. Only then can robust models or prototypes be built for final evaluation by the client or senior management. A full specification and costing of the product will precede manufacture. Planning and project management are also vital skills. Large corporations such as Sony, the Japanese electronics giant, may have hundreds of industrial design projects running simultaneously.