Glenn Johnson asks us to accept a sort of counter tautology by asking "Does a definition indeed have to actually define?" It's an idea that's perhaps supported by the range of non-defining definitions offered here. As much as "many things mean what we individually intend them to mean" is reminiscent of Alice's encounter with Humpty Dumpty, there is -some- truth in the notion. But if "what design means to us individually [is] left to our own imaginations" then we don't have a field, we have a word, and a fairly meaningless one at that.
I've argued here that we don't have -a- field, we have a cluster of fields that have various commonalities. I don't see it as variously intersecting sets; more like intersecting clusters. There's no clear border to, say, graphic design/not graphic design and there are several centers of gravity that variously define or fail to define the field (depending on who you're talking to.) This is complicated by the fact that defining graphic design doesn't pinpoint what part of graphic design is the "design" part. I assume other design fields' definitions are similarly fuzzy and in contention.
Add to that the several definitions of design that Eduardo, Ken, Filippo, I, and others have suggested. (One interesting--and I believe important--one is what Glenn suggested: a relationship with modern production. There is a historical/social connection between that and the design/decoration dichotomy that is one other "definition.")
A few years ago, a friend of mine commented that "There isn't much design in most graphic design." He was applying the strategic planning cluster of design definitions (as opposed to, say, the drawing and formal structuring clusters.)
Thanks to David Durling for the "art & design" explanation. Most graphic design education in the US is in art departments so most of our arguments about the definition of graphic design tend to center around whether and how (graphic) design is like or unlike art. ("Art," of course, suffers from multiple definitions even more than "design" does.) Kathryn Simon asks "What is art? What is design?" I'll let a couple of my favorite writers take a stab at that one.
Kenneth FitzGerald's review <http://www.ephemeralstates.com/2008/06/do-not-read-me-i-am-boring/> of Stefan Sagmeister's -Things I Have Learned So Far in My Life- says "art and design differ only in the segment of the marketplace in which they operate. The essential activity is the same. They just answer to separate validating structures."
Natalia Illyin's "The Man in the Irony Mask" <http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEPMagazine/Article/28843> suggests a distinction of attitude: "Contemporary art’s quarter-century-long vogue for taking things apart, for subverting the distinction between 'high and low,' for irony, for pastiche, for the abjuration of concepts of totality, unity and determinate meaning, for fragmentation—well, that vogue never really has sat well with design. We’ve tried, but it just doesn’t. 'Erasing the distinction between art and design,' which we’ve heard so much about in recent years, is impossible for this reason: Design, by its definition, is generative. It is the process of making things. Taking things apart is the opposite of design. Irony—creating distance—is the opposite of real communication, which is the underlying aim of graphic design.
"We designers are a 'making' tribe. Unlike the Dadaists, whose pose we emulate, we live in a world already fragmented. As to the avant-gardism we still lean on--that long-ago radicalism that set out to shake up a Victorian worldview--its notions of challenge and subversion are still important to contemporary art. But the importance of those notions in design has been eclipsed by greater urgencies. We live in a challenged, confused and subverted world. We don’t need to put any burrs under any saddles. We have enough burrs for a lifetime. We have enough distance. The great challenge now is to find relationship."
Gunnar
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