Design is not making stuff.

Design is not making stuff. It’s not building things.

How often is it said, “Can you design me <a thing>?” It’s a common thing designers hear. It seems people usually mean, “Can you make me <a thing>?”

Yes, designers create things while solving problems, but that’s not the whole picture of what’s going on. Designers “make stuff” to understand how to solve problems. Good designers explore a variety of solutions to identify the best path forward. They “make” ideas tangible with some medium like wood, metal, or digital mediums.

So, the discipline of design is poised and equipped to solve nebulous problems by “how” we create, not simply by creating something.

This means we shouldn’t treat design like a production line because design doesn’t function that way. Design tries to understand what to build. Design isn’t the act of building it. Design is more like act of defining the blueprints of a house and less like the act of building the house.

Design is the link between an opportunity to deliver value and the materials available. That means designers live with one foot in the nebulous problem world and one foot in the material solution world.

Designers, we need to act as that kind of bridge. It can happen in a variety of ways. How we present our work should tie the elements of the solution to the problem in view. When asking for feedback, ask questions targeted at the problems we’re trying to answer with design work. And reveal more of the exploration process by exposing some of the solutions you explored along the way and the reasoning behind your choices.

Additional Note: While editing this article, even my AI assistant told me, “You’re using the word ‘design’ wrong.” And AI is trained and informed based on a broad set of linguistic data. So, generally speaking, the model that was helping me shows the gap in understanding what design is and how it functions.

An AI assistant telling me that “design” needs an article like “The” before it.

This AI assistant was pushing for yet another “definition” of design by assigning it a single definition as a noun. It pushed the noun definition as “something that’s produced” rather than “a practice or discipline”.

While it’s a different disconnect, it betrays the same fundamental thinking. Design is about producing something, a “design”.