In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.
For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.
Design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do.
We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.
To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all?
Graphic design was largely about communication in an artistic or creative manner, much like writing is used to convey ideas. Many designers completely miss that aspect of the "art." Some are completely satisfied with just making things pretty, without taking the communication element into consideration.
If design is the first signal of human intention.
Usually, as designers, you try to create meaning.
Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.
The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.
