[andruby]

I like your description, and it resonates with how I see things.

A lot of people think of aesthetics when they hear "design". But design is about how things work. Everything we use was at some point designed by someone.

In our SaaS company we changed the role of Designers to Product Designers to help people understand it a little better.

[atoav]

I mean in the end aesthetics are intricately intertwined with how things are perceived and thus how they work.

There is only so much information a person can process at once, there are certain expectations where they would find things those can be met or sub erted, colors, font choice, all important for how information gets processed on the functional level.

So in the end design cannot exist with some degree of aesthetical choice, and the better designers are the better they are at choosing aesthetics that serve the functional choices (if that is the goal of their designs).

If you make it completely utilitarian it might become boring, and the function of a design in a SaaS company could also be to sell the product..