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AHO WORKS StudieS 2011-2012
Institute of Design
Can Designers Design Anything?
Let us first examine the claim by applying
the same question to other research-based
professions.
Can doctors heal anything? The question is
absurd. We all know they can’t.
But designers are not doctors. The fields are
very different, doctors are reactive and react
to health problems, while designers are pro-
active and generative, creating new things. So
designers to a much greater degree create their
own criteria and conditions. At the same time
they need to involve an ever greater number
of given dynamic parameters that inform the
design. For the doctor the criteria for success
are quite clear. For designers they are relative
and debatable.
But what if we twist the question a lit-
tle: Can doctors heal anything better than
non-doctors? The question to my mind is: Yes.
Though many people would claim that there
are others who also heal, there is next to no
scientific evidence that they can heal better
than doctors, or that they actually can heal
anything at all.
What about designers? Can they design
anything better than non-designers? This
is much harder to answer. We have neigh-
bouring professions, like engineers or stylists
who also seem to design. The term design is
used by many fields and in many ways. We do
not need to engage in these definitions for the
moment, we only need to state what we mean
with designers. For the moment, let’s explore
the issue by simply talking about those design-
ers who graduated at one or the other design
school.
This leads to another difference between
doctors and designers. Doctors have a shared
knowledge base and specialise in clearly
defined areas or develop into generalists,
which also is a well-defined role. Designers
have a far less well-defined knowledge base.
There is a noticeable difference in the foun-
dation training of an arts and crafts-oriented
school and an industrial design school. Special-
izations in design are far less well-defined and
they are in a process of converging as bound-
aries blur.
Despite this convergence and blurring, are
these designers so homogenous that they actu-
ally can jump between all the design specialties
and design anything? Obviously not with great
success. I know an architect who entered the
field of software design but this was based on
personal interest and development of skills
outside of the specialty of architecture and
resulted in a quite long learning curve.
So even within the boundaries of what can
be regarded as the professional area of design,
a designer can only design anything in this field
with limited success.
But can she do it better than non-designers?
There are truly some basic skills and approach-
es that are applicable across the whole design
field. These are visualisation skills and an abil-
ity to integrate and synthesise solutions from
