[mrxd]

It depends on how you define design. Herbert Simon defined it as “to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And there’s a lot of academic work around that.

The problem is that that’s not how the word is used in practice. I think most people would call that “planning”, and certainly design is a type of planning, but not all planning is done by people who we call designers.

I think a better definition that’s actually used in practice is that design is a way of looking at a product as if it was a kind of communication. The central question is “how will people perceive this?” so any type of art skill—not just visual arts, but theatre, music, writing, etc—is potentially transferable.

Communication is a universal human skill, so it raises the question of why a separate discipline has emerged in companies to handle the communicative aspects of the product. And I think this is because many people who work in tech fields are educated in fields with very specific conventions of communication, and an expectation that the burden of understanding lies with the listener. When these norms inform the creation of a product, especially when it’s aimed at non-technical users, it leads to “bad design”.