The Remit of Design

Note: This is Part 30 of the Ruminations for Aspiring Designers series.

What can design do? What should design do?

What can designers do? What should designers do?

Those are frequent questions being asked in the respective context of design.

More often than not, it has nothing to do with design as soon as “should” is mentioned. Perhaps moral and political philosophies are more relevant – they are more about feeling than about logic and are therefore personal. How you feel matters more when it comes to “should.”

If “can” is about possibility, then design can do anything, as it’s not a stratified and isolated discipline, but permeates almost anything artificial. If it’s about capability, then it circles back not to itself, but to humanity — how should we live? What makes a good society? Philosophy.

The world and its problems are becoming more complex, open, dynamic and networked.

Nowadays, designers rarely work alone. It has become almost impossible for a single designer to possess all the necessary knowledge and skills to develop a complicated design.

Kees Dorst, Understanding Design 2e

We can only look at design from different angles, through different lenses and at different levels to speculate what it means and how we practice it.

Fortunately, there are a few really good starters.

Scott Berkun’s How Design Makes the World is a sharp, concise and highly accessible starter, which lives up to its goal of demystifying design for everyone.

Design: The Key Concepts is another gem in the same regard – just as concise and wide-ranging.

Kees Dorst’s Notes on Design: How Creative Practice Works provides an insider perspective with a panoramic overview of what designers do.

Digital Design: A History helps you establish a foundational understanding of what digital means to the world of design, with insightful details on its deep entanglement with digital technology.

Last but not the least, The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change is an honourable exploration on what makes the design practice ethical.

But, of course, the remit of design never resides in books.

It’s always in the way you do it.

What you design matters. How you design matters. But perhaps why you design matters the most.

Your remedy as a designer says just as much as who you are and what you stand for as a designer.

{END}