I look at design as a univeral tool for problem solving.
However most people and client I meet seem to see design only as the visual aspect of the solution.
The “How it looks” versus being the “how it works“.
So I decided to make a visual represention of it.
Design is everywhere
Design sit really at the crossroad of three fields – Art, Business and tech
Art, most often is the one it is associated with – in a world view where designers are just artists-for-hire to prettify the stuff the developpers/engineers do.
But that’s quite far from the truth.
While it is true that some if not most designers are also artists of some kind – the work designers get hire to do is not art.
They are hired to solve a problem.
Sometime this problem is to solve a user experience issue, or indeed a graphic issue (as in “this is ugly, gotta make it pretty” – which is a valid problem and rightfully addressed by making things pretty.) However, fixing a leaking sales funnel to figure out why all users are dropping out of this ecommerce cart, that’s a problem you don’t fix by making a prettier cart icon.
Designing the business model to adapt to new opportunity is less about art and more about business. Yet, it is a design question. It will use similar methodology to understand the different stakeholders and interests.
For instance framework like the value proposition canvas of Alex Osterwalder, I think, get into this category of design applied to business problems.
Technology and design – well for a start I wanted to put engineering there first, because engineering embed design very explicitly.
Found this random video by simply searching on youtube “design in engineering” and if you watch it (it is only 2 min) you will hear some terms like “discovery phase” or “mockups” etc. which are used in every design process
Bottom line :
Design is really about problem solving.
I hope I will one day find an easy and simple way to convey this…
By the way, if you have any interesting materials on this – video / text / reference on the topic, feel free to get in touch, I’d be happy to share it here.