If we are not equipped to think design, we are susceptible to confusing design with other work practices. For example we might reduce design to a set of tools, techniques or skills, or to a role with a set of responsibilities. Or we might tautologically define design as whatever work a designer does. Or we might just outsource the definition to experts — to whoever has convinced the most people to take their word on what design is and does.

But let us assume for a moment that design has an essence — that design is something definite, actual, specific — that some ways of working are not design, or even at cross-purposes with design. What if the tools and techniques designers use can be appropriated by other practices and used for non-design purposes or ideals? What if designers themselves are put to work using their own techniques to serve ideals contrary to design? What if design experts have won their influence — and their right to define design — precisely by abandoning design’s purpose and handing over its techniques to those who misunderstand or oppose design’s ideals?

A busy designer could easily drift out of design practice altogether. Such a designer might feel that something has been lost, but lack concepts and words to account for what has happened. And this compounds the sense of loss with perplexity.

A perplexity is a problem so deep that it defies words and concept — and every attempt to understand it or talk about it induces angst. To avoid the angst, we must avoid confronting the sense of loss. We ignore it or dismiss it or explain it away or deny its existence. But the loss only intensifies, and angst darkens the loss with foreboding.

I intuit a growing opportunity to think design. An anxious and demoralized design community needs language to describe what has happened to us and account for why it has happened. It needs language and concepts to convey design’s importance to business and to moral orders above business, to which business must answer. And it needs practical philosophy that does better justice to design’s own What, How and Why — ideas, practices and ideals — to help designers stay more faithful to their craft.

For so long, designers have blurred, adjusted, adapted, concealed and outright misrepresented how we work and why we work that many of us have suffered the punishment of dishonesty: estrangement from truth itself.

This must change, and on some level, most sensitive designers feel it even if they do not know how to know it.