Thursday, August 30, 2012

The Meaning of Design

What comes to mind when the word "design" is said?  It seems so obvious being a word I hear every day, but I found myself struggling to come up with an exact definition that includes everything.  To begin, I thought of the most basic definition possible: to create something.  But design isn't necessarily "creating something" so much as "creating a plan for the production of something".  So the brainstorm continued.  What is the purpose of designing something?  Obviously there is a function or need that must be met, lest there be no purpose for the creation, but design is what shapes the object into something valuable.  While putting four 2x4s on a piece of ply-board may make a table, aesthetics are what really make the piece.  While there is technically a design to the table, there's really no design to it.  So I began to shift my definition more towards aesthetics and function and came up with this.

Design: a plan that combines aesthetics with function in order to allow the possibility of something to be created that would improve quality of life.  Without design, nothing would exist.

Of course there are different types of design.  There's interior design, graphic design, architectural design, motor design, etc.  But all types involve satisfying a need or function and making it beautiful, going from a ply-board table to a elegant round table made of mahogany.  It's impossible for anything to exist without design simply because an image was present in the mind of the creator, whether they wrote it down or kept it mental, there was a plan!

Imagine where we would be if God he had never designed our existence, our world, and everything in it.


--God Bless,
   K

No comments:

Post a Comment