Design is a talismanic word with nearly infinite meanings. Design is fashion design and urban design and graphic design and product design; it's also assay design (biology) and object-oriented design (computer science) and intelligent design (creationism) and designer drugs and designer dykes and “I think he has designs on you.” Some of these uses seem to have little in common. And yet design's English-language lives do orbit around certain ideas: intention, planning, aesthetics, method, vocation. These ideas together form a social system that generates meaning, defining the boundaries of knowledge and the locations of cultural and economic value. Design and the ideas that travel with it, in other words, make up a discourse.
Which is also to say: they're historical. Even in English, design hasn't always meant what it means now. As recently as the late 19th century, people used the word to refer to most visual arts. (“The arts of design,” as in Michelangelo's time, were all arts that might begin with what Michelangelo called disegno, drawing for the purposes of planning.) But then the discourse changed. Early in the 20th century, design came to refer to the visual styling of existing products. And then, as modernist ideas circulated in Europe before World War II and as Americans adopted the idea of “industrial design,” design began to refer not just to styling products but also to conceiving and planning their function. That was when design came to mean, as Steve Jobs put it much later, “not just what it looks like and feels like” but “how it works.”
Design means something even broader now. Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn't have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.
Of all these developments, the idea of design as a broadly applicable way of thinking—the idea of “design thinking”—may end up being the most influential. The broader category of “design” can be found everywhere—in advertising (Design Within Reach, Target's Made By Design), on television (Grand Designs, Design on a Dime, Divine Design), and in podcasts and blogs (99% Invisible, designlovefest). But “design thinking” has also reached the halls of power. You can find it in the upper reaches of corporations and governments and universities. It organizes and mediates decision-making among executives and elites. At Stanford's d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.” So what is it?
“Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.”
Design has been a profession in the United States since the 1930s. When consumer purchasing power collapsed during the Great Depression, manufacturers embraced “industrial design” in hopes that imbuing consumer goods with artistry would entice more people to buy them. The practice stuck. By the mid-1940s, there were two thriving professional organizations for industrial designers. Designers convened at MoMA in 1946 for the “Conference on Industrial Design, A New Profession” to discuss what standards and oaths and educational requirements they might adopt for their new craft.
But the story of design thinking as such—and of how design reached its apotheosis as a floating signifier, detached from any one object or medium or output—starts with World War II. As the war began, American industrial designers entered government service en masse. They designed everything from liquid propellant rockets to molded plywood splints to a pair of strategy rooms and a giant spinning globe for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And they exposed their collaborators—scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and others in industry, academia, and government—to the idea of the designer as an all-capable architect of clever solutions across domains.
As their collaborators dispersed back into their professions after the war, design's sphere of influence expanded accordingly—as did the meaning of the word. Industrial designers got more work. Graphic design became recognized as a separate craft. More general “design conferences” arose—conferences focused not on a single subdiscipline (industrial design, fashion design, architecture) but on the new idea of design as a unified practice. The International Design Conference in Aspen, founded in 1951 by Walter Paepcke and Herbert Bayer, is a good example. Paepcke, president of the Container Corporation of America, believed the US to be in a “new era” in which “the influence of the designer and his consultants penetrates the entire organization.” The Aspen conference became an annual affair, attended by notable architects and industrial and graphic designers, as well as by Gloria Steinem, C. Wright Mills, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Susan Sontag, and Gwendolyn Brooks. “Design” had become not just a set of occupations but a broadly pertinent domain of concern.
“Americans love design most when we're afraid.”