What is design?

"Design" is an activity process that conveys a plan, planning, and assumption through visual form. Human beings transform the world, create civilization, and create material and spiritual wealth through labor, and the most basic and important creative activity is creation. Design is the advance planning of creation activities. The planning technology and planning process of any creation activity can be understood as design.

Content expansion:

The simplest definition of design is a "purposeful creative act."

With the beginning of the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern cities, human society has ushered in the era of standardized and mechanized mass production, which has also forced design to separate from manufacturing and become an independent profession. Workshop owners and craftsmen in the traditional handicraft era were both designers and producers, and even sellers and users. After the industrial revolution, the design that was independent from the manufacturing industry was redivided into two parts: styling and functional design. Designers are responsible for the exterior design, while engineers are responsible for the internal functionality of the product. Design gradually became a specialized discipline in its subsequent development. After the invention of photography in 1877, human society entered an era of mass reproduction. Photography's realistic recording of real life has greatly stimulated and impacted traditional realism artists. In order to get rid of the constraints of traditional realism techniques, artists worked hard to create modern art. From Cezanne's artistic creation, we can see that the painter abandoned the complete imitation of nature. His works contain almost all the modern art elements of the 20th century. The emergence of modern art affected art design, making design begin to move from tradition to modernity, and the concept of modern art design was also born at the same time. The origin of modern art design began at the end of the 19th century, that is, the British Arts and Crafts Movement; the period from the end of the 19th century to the First World War was the preparation period for modern design; the mechanization era between the First and Second World Wars was the adolescence of modern design , it developed together with modern cities. After experiencing the baptism of the world economic depression in 1929, modern design became more rational and matured.

According to the definition of industrial designer Victor Papanek, design is a conscious and intuitive effort to construct a meaningful order. A more detailed definition is as follows:

Step 1: Understand users’ expectations, needs, and motivations, and understand business, technology, and industry needs and constraints.

Step 2: Transform what you know into product planning (or the product itself), so that the form, content, and behavior of the product become useful, usable, desirable, and in the future Economically and technically feasible. (This is the meaning and basic requirement of design)

This definition can be applied to all areas of design, although the concerns in different areas vary from form, content to behavior.