Dear Rob,

The verb "design" entered the Engligh language in the 14th century.

Merriam-Webster's (1993: 343) defines design as: 
"1 a : to conceive and plan out in the mind <he 
~ed a perfect crime> b : to have as a purpose : 
intend <he ~ed to excel in his studies> c : to 
devise for a specific function or end <a book ~ed 
primarily as a college textbook> 2 archaic : to 
indicate with a distinctive mark, sign or name 3 
a : to make a drawing, pattern or sketch of b : 
to draw the plans for c : to create, fashion, 
execute or construct according to plan : devise, 
contriveŠ"

M-W gives the etymology, ": Middle English, to 
outline, indicate, mean, from Middle French & 
Medieval Latin; Middle French designer to 
designate, from Medieval Latin designare, from 
Latin, to mark out, from de- + signare to mark -- 
"

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a richer 
etymology: "a. F. désigner (16th c. in Rabelais, 
in 14th c. desinner Godef. Suppl.) 'to denote, 
signifie, or shew by a marke or token, to 
designe, prescribe, appoint' (Cotgr.), ad. L. 
dsignre, dissignre to mark out, trace out, 
denote, DESIGNATE, appoint, contrive, etc., f. 
DE- I. 2 and DIS- + signre to mark, signum mark, 
SIGN. Cf. Pr. designar, desegnar, Sp., Pg. 
designar, It. disegnare (in 16th c. also 
dissegnare, designare, Florio). In It. the vb. 
had in 16th c. the senses 'to designe, contriue, 
plot, purpose, intend; also to draw, paint, 
embroither, modle, pourtray' (Florio); thence 
obs. F. desseigner 'to designe, purpose, proiect, 
lay a plot' (Cotgr.), and mod.F. dessiner, in 
16th c. designer, 17th c. dessigner, to design in 
the artistic sense. In Eng., design combines all 
these senses."

The word has changed from the earlier has many 
meanings now. It seems to me unfortunate to 
suggest that those who come from "non-design" 
backgrounds use the word in its large, general 
sense rather than the specific , "art and design" 
sense used by those with backgrounds in art and 
design schools.

As a human activity, "to design" is to plan. Some 
plan on a large professional scale. Others do it 
in small, insignficant ways. Some plan on a small 
professional scale. Many professional design 
activities involve planning small things and 
executing the plans to produce those things. 
Other kinds of professional design require 
planning things on such a large scale that the 
process requires designers from a dozen different 
fields.

Let me put this on the level of a small example 
that represents thousands of similar small 
examples in daily life. The large and beautiful 
new campus of the Norwegian School of Management 
would have been well served, for example, if we 
had used more designers from what some call 
"non-design" backgrounds to help plan many of the 
aspects of the campus that our award-winning 
architects and designers did not review from a 
"non-design" planning-for-use perspective.

Wandering around the school yesterday, I 
discovered that one of the men's bathrooms has 
four toilet stalls and four urinals, allowing a 
significant amount of traffic flow. It might be 
reasonable to assume that four wash basins will 
serve the needs of a staggered series of users. 
It is not reasonable to imagine that only one 
hand-dryer with a long, slow drying cycle will 
handle the traffic in an ever-narrowing 8-4-1 
bottleneck. Perhaps adding enough dryers would 
have disturbed the lines of room or called for a 
room larger than worked well on the drawings. The 
issue is not that the architects and designers 
did badly. Generally they did not. The issue is 
that many kinds of projects require many kinds of 
design awareness. "Non-design backgrounds" seem 
to promote some of these kinds of awareness more 
effectively than the backgrounds people develop 
in art and design schools. One would not hire an 
applied mathematician or an anthropologist or a 
user advocate to solve this one problem, but a 
building the size of a small city could have used 
one of each to assist the design process in the 
hundreds of similiar problems that will turn up 
over the next six months.

At the other end of the kinds of complex projects 
that require design skills from many bckgrounds, 
some design activities are simple, everyday 
activities. Nevertheless, even simple activities 
sometimes require planning, as anyone knows who 
has ever encouraged a reluctant youngster to pick 
a pair of socks so that he will reach the school 
bus on time.

In my view, it is best to use the word "design" 
in a sense that describes what the word means 
without limiting it to our own background. The 
use of adjectives helps to describe what KIND of 
design we mean.

Terry Love and I have been slowly struggling 
through a project in which we have identified 
over 650 different fields and subfields of design 
and design research. Most of these fields entail 
a professional practice. Only a small fraction of 
these fields are found in art and design schools.

If we are to speak of redefining tne word design, 
I might argue that people in art and design 
schools have redefined the word design to suit 
their skills and interests. This would not make 
much sense in a large community that involves 
many professions.

At the same time, I'd propose that it makes 
little sense in our large community to suggest 
that people with "non-design backgrounds" use of 
a word with broad applications in its large and 
-- in English -- original sense.

Yours,

Ken


On Mon, 1 Aug 2005 17:07:55 -0700, rob curedale 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>The word design is derived from the the word "to draw"
>This derivation implies a certain amount and quality
>of thought and planning in the activity.
>
>To define design as any activity of modifying the
>environment I think distorts it's original meaning and
>redefines  any insignificant action as design. this
>new redefinition of design seems to be popular with
>those who come from non design backgrounds. I think
>that it has an unhelpfull reflection on the
>professional activity of design which has always
>involved more complex activity than blowing your nose
>or picking your socks in the morning.


-- 

Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management

Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School

email: [log in to unmask]