I recently tried to explain to myself again what “design” means. But why? In my role, or more precisely: my profession as a designer, that’s not necessary. You can design perfectly well without knowing what design means. The job market provides requirements and titles that more or less coincide with people’s skills and activities, and then you get started.
But here, too, are robust motives for a more reflective understanding. This understanding is not about truthful but strategic statements. Anyone who wants to improve the position and relevance of design in (their) company would do well to know what they are dealing with.
A strategic concept of design aims at change: perhaps I want to give the topic more prestige in the organization, be more involved in product or business decisions, earn more money, bring in new employees, etc. To do this, I need to find out what everyone else associates with design. Reflecting on the strategic concept of design must always be done with a view to the other disciplines: management, development, marketing, operations, etc.
What are the expectations and the expected expectations of my colleagues? What do they expect from me as a designer, and what do they expect me to expect from them? And what do I, in turn, expect them to expect from me? These questions bring us to the (implicit) concept of “design,” on which the concrete form of these expectations depends. The better I understand them, the better I can model the understanding.
Whatever comes out of this is the respective status quo. In the next step, I can derive from this which problems and tasks I am asked to solve – and why. I also feel out where the limits of my activities and expertise lie. From there, I move on to evaluation, goal setting, and strategy development. Do I agree with this? Would I instead go somewhere else? If so, where is this somewhere else, and what is going on in this place? Where are opportunities to raise my hand; where can I unexpectedly contribute my knowledge as a designer to open up new paths?
As I said, this has little to do with “truth” but rather with the reality of what is going on in non-designers’ minds. That’s okay, but it’s not sufficient. It would be fatal to altogether dispense with a more scientifically ambitious term. On the one hand, so as not to be dictated what one’s profession consists of. On the other hand, elaborate images help to sharpen one’s profile, i.e., to ask oneself what kind of designer one would like to be given the multitude of variants buzzing around – and whether and how this works in one’s company.
Sharpening your profile in this way requires you to design the design concept itself. That is the core idea of the term “term,” its design in the medium of language, through distinctions, attributions, positions, and negations. We, therefore, find ourselves in a circular argument: to design the concept, we need a concept – even if it is a provisional one.
Precisely because a multitude of statements charge this term with meaning, we should use them and create our very own concept, trained at the interface between science and reality. Who would entrust a designer with the company’s strategy if they don’t have a strategic view of their profession?
