What is Design? A case for Design

This was a big one, Design encompasses so many areas that when I started to narrow down the focus for creating this case, I felt I wanted to talk about so much and there was so little time. Funny enough, in the Design Thinking process we are commended to take decisions, choose which problem -or part of it- we want to tackle.

So as I jotted down some ideas for creating a case for Design, I knew I wanted it to be visually engaging and not take it so seriously as I tend to do.

Day to day designing

I believe everyone is able to be creative, if you look at peoples lives, we’re often finding ways around to accommodate our lives, or just make them easier, to make ends meet.
Take as an example those famous ‘life-hacks’, those are nothing more than workarounds and by doing that we’re designing an easier life (up to a certain extent).

What do we call design?

This was one of the main blocks of what I wanted to share, there are so many conceptions about design, what’s on the surface for most people is to ‘make things pretty’, but I believe thats only a small part of it, we, as designers are here to design an experience that exists to solve a problem.

We are here to solve existing problems

This is where research comes to play, we shouldn’t assume what the problem is without talking to the actual people being affected from it. It’s easy to assume others problems from our point of view, take as an example what happened with a program that wanted to give out free menstrual pads to girls in poverty Africa, the people who ideated this ‘solution’ thought the problem was lack of hygiene supplies. That problem statement came from a first-world lens, in which you are able to go to the store and buy them, but it did not take into account that schools in Africa did not have proper restrooms, trash bins to dispose those and also that there is also a temporal disability that can happen when going through your period that might disable you from being able to attend school altogether (i.e, getting sick, having pain, etc.)

Disclaimer: Even as I’m writing this I can only speak from my (non-existing) experience and research on this specific topic.

So to summarize, the problem was not the lack of hygiene supplies. And this is a clear example of why we need to get to the root cause of the problem.