Transcript

Everyone is a designer0:07

My name is Matt Legrand and I'm a designer.

The word design means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and this is because design is such a vast field. You've got graphic designers and interface designers and web designers and process designers and user experience, and design isn't just discrete fields of study, it permeates into everything we do. Everyone is a designer whether they know it or not. When you rearrange your desk or the app icons on your phone or the pots and pans in your kitchen for better efficiency, or just to create a pleasing arrangement, you've just become a designer, because you're using visual principles to affect your environment.

Levels of thinking0:52

So the only honest way to think about design is not in terms of market segmentation or academics but in levels of thinking. There's been a lot of discussion around this question of can design save the world, and people are having to rethink design's role in society and how far it can go. Lots of people have different opinions about this because, again, lots of people have different definitions of design. There are those who self-identify as designers who are very skilled digital artists and illustrators and treat design as the applied version of fine art, and their work can have a substantial impact on culture and society. Then there are designers who create and improve business processes and social services and human interactions, and again they have a huge impact by creating the environments and physical objects and media platforms that people connect with and shape their lives by.

Designing how the world operates1:51

But you can even go a tier above that. There's this relatively new approach to design where the emphasis is not on the end result but the process, the theory, the mental toolkit of visual problem solving, and with this framework design becomes a near bulletproof method of creative solution generation that can be applied to any kind of problem, not just the ones that generally come to mind when people talk about design. There's no shortage of complicated problems on a global scale. People are starting to realize that the way we've been doing things isn't working that great, and it's not getting better, it's getting worse. This is where the role of the designer is someone who can use their creative arsenal to develop real solutions, meaningful solutions, lasting solutions can make a difference. There is no limit to the types of solutions design can create. We can do more than design how the world looks, we can design how the world operates.