Design Definitions

“Design is an interdisciplinary and integrative process constituting a professional field and an intellectual discipline.”

“Despite differences, ten challenges face the making disciplines. Common concerns and challenges are building bridges among design fields. These challenges bind the making disciplines together as a common research field.
The three performance challenges of making disciplines are that they:

1. Act on the physical world.


2. Address human needs.


3. Generate the built environment

Changes in the larger world cause design scholars, practitioners, and students to converge on common challenges. These challenges require frameworks of theory and research to address problem areas and solve cases.

These problem areas involve four substantive challenges:

1. Ambiguous boundaries between artefact, structure, and process.


2. Large-scale social, economic, and industrial frames.


3. A complex environment of needs, requirements, and constraints.


4. Information content that often exceeds the value of physical substance.

They also involve three contextual challenges:

1. A complex environment in which many projects or products cross the boundaries of several organizations, stakeholder, producer, and user groups.


2. Projects or products that must meet the expectations of many organizations, stakeholders, producers, and users.


3. Different – and sometimes conflicting – demands at every level of production, distribution, reception, and control.”

“Professional design practice today involves advanced knowledge. This knowledge isn’t a higher level of professional practice. It is a qualitatively different form of professional practice. It is emerging in response to the demands of the information society and the knowledge economy.”

Friedman, Ken, in Durling, David, ed. 2000. Doctoral education in design: foundations for the future. Stoke-on-Trent: Staffordshire University Press.