design is a verb: practice
Over the past couple of years, I’ve tuned in to SO MANY online presentations, Zoom talks and virtual conferences. It’s the only way we all stayed connected during the pandemic, after all. One topic that popped up over and over again has become a discernible thread through the way I am approaching this great endeavor known as entrepreneurship:
Design is much more the practice than it is the product.
Ask a southerner if barbecue is a noun or a verb, and you'll get a passionate response that it's a noun. Sure, it’s a labor of love, getting up before dawn, tending and mopping all day. But what you end up with is unmistakably barbecue. I feel the same way about design… only in reverse.
Process is such an integral part of it. So much so that when I think about work, I don’t think of the products and deliverables as just the design. I think of them as the culmination of the act of designing. Design is a practice, an active thing. But the designs that result are as well. Even when they’re complete. Because they live on, they evolve.
I worked on a project with Good Thinking Atlanta a few years ago to give voice to a monumental building project on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus. The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design puts sustainability into practice. From conception to design to operation, this “living building” is a process of discovery by its creators to find and test the best ways to make our built environment more sustainable–more like nature itself.
The project was not a simple one: design a brand voice for the building that fits within the Georgia Tech standards, while embodying the principles of the Living Building Challenge and being accessible to the greater community the building would serve. That meant taking a wide view of who would use the building, from Tech students to elementary school classes to a myriad of organizations around the Southeast. And because the building would be a living enterprise, that meant whatever solutions we provided would need to grow and adapt as the building itself would.
The project was very clearly a brand application of practice. And when we looked at it from that lens, the identity of the building was accessible and enduring sustainability. Take a look at the result.
I share this case study because sometimes identity is defined by an action, rather than a characteristic.
Sarah Gibbons, then Chief Designer of Nielsen Norman Group, talked about the designer’s identity in a short talk during the 2020 AIGA Design Conference. Typically, we designers identify ourselves by what we deliver – print designer, web designer, brand designer. If you think about the deliverable as a characteristic of the action of designing, then we tend to identify ourselves by what we do. But why? Why do we do what we do? Isn’t the why far more important than the what?
When we flip the way we think about design – and identity, of course – it opens up all kinds of possibilities.
Design is the way I think, the dance my brain and imagination do on their way to an idea, and then the energy that pushes the pencil or pixels around as it comes to life. Design is the process in its entirety. So I guess I can say that design is how I live life, even outside of work.
Design is the way I think, the dance my brain and imagination do on their way to an idea, and then the energy that pushes the pencil or pixels around as it comes to life. Design is the process in its entirety. Design is action. It’s a practice. And like any other practice, it’s constantly in motion, being fed and stretched and tested. And really, isn’t that what life is?