Many designers have adopted Jared Spool’s definition of design: Design is the rendering of intent.
Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as “the rendering of intent.” The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.
We’ve found this definition seems to resonate with people more than any other. People can see the relationship between the intended outcome and the process that renders it.
There is much to like in this definition. It is crisp, compact and elegant.
The definition is broad but still meaningfully constrained. Design renders but does not execute, produce or otherwise actualize the intent. The rendering specifies a future actualization.
The more I reflect on it, the more I like this definition — at least as the most universal definition of design.
Anyone who says they are designing anything means at least this.
My only question concerns whether this definition of design really answers the question people are asking when they ask professional designers what they do.
For some time now, it has been de rigueur to claim that, because everyone designs, everyone is a designer.
Spool affirms this explicitly:
An implication of this definition for design is how it changes our notion of who is a designer.
In any organization, many people share what they’d like to see as the intentions of the design. The business people have intentions with regards to how the business makes money. The technical people have intentions to best use servers, networks, and other technical resources. The legal team has intentions on how to best protect the organization from legal threats.
As these people use their influence to define the outcome of the design, they are, in effect, designing. There’s an old saying, everyone thinks they are a designer. Well, everyone who participates in the rendering of their intention is a designer, using this definition.
So by Spool’s definition (and also Herbert Simon’s, Nigel Cross’s, etc.) everyone does render intent, or devises a course of action meant to turn an existing situation into a preferred one, etc. Whenever we make a shopping list we are designing an upcoming trip to the store. Whenever we plan our day we are designing it. What could possibly render intent more than a checklist?
For Spool, the main difference between the design that designers do and the design that all people do is what the intentions include. Designers intend experiences:
Experiences are the journeys that people take before, during, and after coming into contact with our design. We can choose our intentions for what we want our users’ journeys to be. And when we render those intentions, we’re designing for our users’ experiences. Experience design is rendering intentions of the user’s journey.
But here is the problem. Does Spool’s general definition of design really get at what people are implicitly wondering when they ask designers what they do?
Does anyone wonder this way about making plans or shopping lists? I suspect not. Even narrowing the definition of design to what engineers mean when they talk about designing (for example, an algorithm, microchip or suspension bridge) seems to miss something essential. Do people really wonder what engineers are doing when they do engineering design? I seriously doubt it.
Not to get meta, but questions of exactly this kind — questions concerning focus of interest, about different qualities of various experiences, including experience of curiosity, of implicit questions animating explicit questions — are all examples of the kind of thing designers must think about when practicing design that focuses on experiential intent.
Spool deemphasizes the essence of design, and elides the heart of the question, in the effort to provide an accessible definition to non-designers.
It is the experiential intent that a designer’s work is all about. It is this experiential intent — not intents in general — that gives the kind of design that designers do its aura of elusive significance. These are what motivate questions about what design is. People aren’t requesting a compact definition of a general field of activity. They are asking for insights into a field of work that feels important in an elusive way they can’t quite pin down.
The definitions offered by Spool, Simon, Cross and the rest neglect this essential difference, and do less than nothing to elucidate it. They answer a question, but not the relevant one. These answers falsely demystify design. Rather than elucidating the mystery, they suppress and flatten it.
To put it in philosophical language, these general definitions of design identify necessary conditions of all activities that are referred to as designing, but are insufficient to define or clarify what designers do.
But this isn’t just a theoretical philosophical problem. It isn’t idle definitional hair-splitting. It is a practical problem with extensive consequences. Experiential intent changes everything.
Designing across subjective difference is an essentially different activity than planning something that can be understood objectively. The inclusion of subjective factors changes why design matters, and how the work must be done and what conditions and resources are required to do it well.
If experience design is taken as just one more variation on rendering intent, differing only in the scope of the intention, it is natural to assume the activity is essentially like making a checklist or producing a schematic of a microchip. It is reasonable to assume that it involves the same kinds of activities, and differs mainly in what expertise gets applied to the intent-rendering problem.
And if you listen to designers about what gets in the way of good design, you will hear exactly this misconception behind it. The process of shaping an experience another person will have introduces challenges other intent-rendering fields do not face. Designers need iterative contact with the people for whom the design is intended, both to inform the intention and to ensure that the experience will actualize as intended. Further, the process of shaping experiences involves developing systems, but not only that. It also must make sense to people, it must matter to them, and it must be intuitive to deal with — and different people respond very differently to things.
The flattening of design into something like the planning activities of managers and the system-construction activities of engineers simplifies the challenges designers face, and pushes them back into designing things instead of experiences.
Everyone might render intent, but not everyone renders experiential intent.
And rendering experiential intent requires a deep shift in understanding that very few people have undergone. It requires a pluralistic capacity — at minimum an ability to intersubjectively switch between alternate objectivities — and ideally, a capacity to conceive entirely new ones.
It is precisely this capacity that gives design its mysterious importance.
It is a mysterious importance that is felt as different from the utilitarian importance of business people rendering their intentions of making money for the business, or technical people rendering their intentions to use servers, networks, and other technical resources effectively.
And, as Spool himself describes, experience designers must coordinate all these intent-rendering activities so they contribute to rendering an experiential intent.
If designers stop doing this, they may still claim to design in the general sense, but they are not designers in the sense that intrigues and provokes questions. They are planners, list makers and system constructors.
And now with service design, experiences are no longer intended for solitary people, like users or customers or patients and so on. Service designers intend experiences that multiple persons with differing (and potentially conflicting) goals, understandings, attitudes and sensibilities will experience together simultaneously. Part of what these people experience is each other in their various roles in the experience. Polycentered design requires capacities of another order beyond that of mono-centered design fields.
Polycentered experiences (that is, experiences with multiple first-person centers) motivate behaviors that collectively produce emergent properties in social systems (polycentric systems with multiple independent agentic centers, a la Polanyi and Ostrom).