Design is many things to a wide variety of different people across diverse fields and countless contexts…
For me: it’s the difficult to define, but powerful notion of doing things creatively with a particular aim in mind, an attentive approach to solving problems and changing ideas, arrangements or matter.
Design has been defined as:
“the expression of intentionality through interactions and relationships” (Daniel Christian Wahl and Seaton Baxter)
“the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones” (Simon, 1996: 4) & “a rational set of procedures that respond to a well-defined problem”.
“An integrative process – the synthesizing of parts into a whole” (Howard Brown, Robert Cook & Medard Gabel)
“as a liberal art, uniquely well-placed to serve the needs of a technological culture in which many kinds of things are designed, and human problems are complex”(Buchanan, 1992)
“Design is never simply an instantiation of received conventions, derived from what might at times seem to be the stable disciplinary rules of technology or aesthetics…
It is always and necessarily a process of transformation. As such it is an agency of change” (Cope and Kalantziz 2011:49).
Transdisciplinary Design towards Transformation 