Is Design Just Problem Solving?

So I do a lot of my work in-house as a corporate designer. Being in-house and especially being in corporate, you spend a lot of your time trying to build value around your work. This happens a lot because most of your “clients” or stakeholders in the project are not designers. Instead, they come from backgrounds like sales, marketing, engineering, or project management. In those worlds value comes from dollars, or time, or resources. Design can be an afterthought. We’ve all heard this before: “Make it look pretty.”

The phrase “make it look pretty” has stuck in my craw for a long time and so I’ve built this whole manifesto trying to disprove it. I’ve aligned design more to thinking than making. My value as a designer comes from my problem-solving capability, my creativity in solutions. The art comes after it, to support it.

Then I listened to a talk from Stefan Sagmeister about beauty. And since I’ve evolved my thinking. Because Sagmeister proves the point that beauty is design. That to design something that is not beautiful, is a failure of design in the same way that designing something that doesn’t work is a failure. He uses a water bottle as an example: anyone can design a water bottle to function. But only a designer can make it function AND be beautiful.

Will talking about beauty resonate with my corporate stakeholders? Probably not so much. But it’s still important to remember that in order to resonate with others, especially our intended audiences, we can’t forget the beauty in the work. The emotional connection to beauty is what is going to set design work apart from everything else that “just works”.

So here’s to appreciating beauty, and marrying it with design thinking to create exceptional results.