What is Design?

During our 1st year at Greenside Design Centre GDC-Link, they asked us to define design.

Our answers were rigid, general knowledge based, and undeveloped.

This year the same question was asked.

Design is something that is more tangible to me now, less distant and foreign. 

I am building a relationship with my skills and improving on those that need practise.   

1st year, was about stepping out of the box and being able to recognize design, design is everywhere. 

Design is everything. Living, Moving, Organic, Mechanic it doesn’t matter. Design is everything we do on a day to day basis, every object. A pen, a car, television are all products of the invention, imagination and potential, engineered to be a product of a functional design. 

You yourself are a product of design.

Every ligament and party in your body is perfectly designed for existence and function. 

We are all designers in our own way, each an individual inventor. As soon as pen hits paper the design process has begun. A process that, like adding the perfect ingredients to a homemade stew, you start with your main ingredients (ideas), slowly adding in other ingredients over time (research), stirring it (analysing), boiling it (conceptualizing), tasting it (refining). Till eventually you have brewed perfection. This is what we do in design, we taste, touch, feel, smell, we experiment until we are fully satisfied with our main course. 

The design process is essential to master and perfect, and essential to improve yourself as a designer.

From a personal experience design is not perfection. It’s finding something perfect in its imperfections. Design is not rigid. It’s constantly moving, improving looking for "the next best thing". To me it’s a life cycle that never ends. It’s being able to extract your surroundings and project them in your work in a more tangible way than reality. 

Design is a product as well as an art it must sell and in order to sell it must attract and relate to the everyday person. Design is less complicated than we think; only needing to step back from a situation and break down the subject into its simplest form, there is where you will find the best designs. 

Design is taking chances, going with your gut and experimenting. Like riding a rollercoaster for the first time, starting a design is scary but once you have put down the first idea, next ideas flow easier until ideas flow out like an addiction.

In short a great design can only be great after it has been conceptualized, analysed, validated and refined. That’s where creating unperfection to be seen as perfection is performed.

other great design blogs that have inpsired me - 50 top graphic design blogs

This year being my Second year at Greenside Design Centre, is all about putting knowledge gained from First Year into practise for second year projects. With that practise we have to be able to decifer the difference between working smart and not hard. Working smart means being able to time-manage, appropritaley choose media, reference and study and appropriatley apply this, as to not waste time or effort in the design process.

All ready this year I have had my taste of working hard and not smart.

So throughout this year I will be be blogging on projects, any constructive critisim is most welcome, follow me on my discovery into design.