THE STUDY OF DESIGN

Design is a tricky word.

It comes from the word de – which means out or from – and the word signum, which refers to a mark or a sign.  Design ... to mark out.
Most dictionaries list synonyms like planning, delineating, contriving, scheming, intending, indicating, sketching, and more.  Design as the organizing part of the creative process.  Every stage up to but not including the actual making of a thing.

In the media, the word design tends to mean the styling of products.  The process that makes the world of objects look as it does.  So not just the planning of the project, but the execution too, the material manipulation.  It is a broader meaning but very much tied to taste and trends.  Design in this sense is momentary, it can be hip or tired, great or lousy, hot or cool, chic or retro.

But look through an undergraduate catalog and you start to see design in an even broader way.

Product, industrial, fashion, architectural, graphic, interior, advertising, automotive, and a whole
bunch of other kinds of design.  This goes far beyond the planning and scheming or the look and style of things to include the function, the use, the structure, and even the entire creative process start to finish.  And not just in the arts but also in the sciences, where you can design a theory or a proof, a device, a process, an experiment.

Take these all together and what have you got?

The study of making things and nothing less.   In this sense, design is the theory and practice of our human need to remake the world in our image, to fix what is, to stubbornly refuse to accept things as
they are.  Creativity, psychology, craft, production, planning, construction, materiality, aesthetics, formal study…all of these are part of the design process. To study design is to immerse oneself in a curriculum of social, political, economic, scientific, mythic, human, aesthetic, practical, and even impractical forces.

In this way we might discuss the design on the surface of a bowl, for instance, but we could not stop there.  To understand the true design of the thing, we would have to go on to investigate the method of its construction, the craft of its making, the technology of its production, the tools of its creation, the culture of its use, the politics of its objectivity, and so on.

Every made thing, from logo to industrial revolution, points to a complexity of study.  The word design takes on an entire lexicon of meanings…the whole rich, romantic, robust adventure of conceiving, making, and using everything there is.

Here is another definition: Design…an integrative process of thought and action that manifests our dreams.  It is the means by which we impress our will on the world and make our creativity real.  The most liberal of all the liberal arts.  Design in this wide sense is what you study when you want to know what the made world is all about.