This is a blog about design as a behaviour, a process, and a habit. It is not about design as a product. If you want that, head on over to Coolhunting or a hundred other blogs. The design product is nice enough – it’s just not what you will get here.
Design is mental alchemy, and the Holy Grail. It is the most beguiling experience, narcotic in its appeal; seductive and barbed and baroque, all at once. Design is profoundly personal, intrinsically bound up with our identities and our desires. Design lays us bare, exposes our flaws and vulnerabilities, and pins them on a wall for critical judgement.
Design is the most powerful of all the human problem-solving behaviours, and yet there are no universal formulas, rules or constants, despite what ‘Design Thinking’ consultants would have you believe. This became apparent to me at architecture school, where I was not taught design so much as to think and behave like a designer, through emulating the techniques and methods revealed to me.
Design training at its best is rigorous and precise, and yet it may superficially appear loose and ambiguous, particularly to the uninitiated. This dichotomy is well understood in the design world, and it will cut like a blade through the material we explore here.
This is a blog about design from the inside, written as I attempt to share the strange patterns and shapes that get projected on the inside of my skull as I go about my work.
