Scope
[Design for the real world, Victor Papanek.]
I was a fan of this one, by Victor Papanek, for a little while.
“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.”
I like this because “meaningful” means we’re talking about things which mean stuff, to humans. And I like the word conscious because it implies the designer is actually working at a problem. A computer algorithm couldn’t design something, although it could be used as a tool.
I think we’d all nod at this definition. It makes sense.