What a Designer Does (Part II)

Designers envision unseen opportunities.

This is for me one of the defining attributes of a Designer—the innate ability to imagine something beyond what exists. As with my previous post in this series, one doesn’t need to be fluent in design theory to be a designer.

Herbert Simon (from The Sciences of the Artificial) states this idea best when he says:

“Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent — not with how things are but with how they might be — in short, with design.”

Consider then the following acts of Design:

• Imagining a better presidential brief

• Creating a movie prop from old camera parts

• Inventing Bank of America’s recent Keep the Change program

• My friend Girish writing a new FireFox extension

• Business consultants C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel describing new ideas such Core Competencies or Strategic Intent

• Designing the iPod click wheel

• Bringing European style cafes to the US

Yes, design tends to be associated with better looking things. But design is far more than aesthetics. And design is more than creative problem-solving. Design is seeing what others don’t see, and then making that visible (the subject of my next post in this series).