What does a designer actually do?

If you were to ask students what a doctor does, or what a lawyer does, they would probably have an answer for you. If you were to ask them what a designer does? The answer is a bit trickier.

How can one define design, especially without using the word “design”? A designer… designs things. Well, that does not help us much. We hear the term “design” pop up in many different contexts — graphic design, product design, design-thinking, the design process — but how can we break down its attributes to understand what it truly is?

We are Alexandra Coston and Wonuola Abiodun, two juniors at MIT majoring in architecture who have, for the past two years, been working with the MIT Museum and Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), MIT’s new design hub. Our quest to understand design stemmed from previous research on design education with Rosa Weinberg: a trained architect, K-12 design educator, and current K-12 design education lead at MAD. Our research involves isolating the skills taught in design education, determining which are the most important, and studying how they can be transferred to other occupations than just architecture or other traditional design disciplines. Our overarching theory was that if we can teach K-12 students how to be great designers, then they will perform better in their studies and careers, no matter the field they choose.

We began by observing the drop-in sessions in the MIT Museum’s Maker Hub, which offers hands-on making activities to the public. Their existing curriculum focuses on art, science, and technology, and we sought to incorporate design as well.

Reflecting on how to adapt the existing sessions, we found ourselves spending significant time determining which design skill each activity should focus on. From our combined experiences in architecture and design education, we generated a list of design skills that could serve as learning goals to teach students: ideation, precedent research, iteration, prototyping, and so on. However, we wanted to go beyond our own ideas.

In his address at The Power of Design, MAD’s 2022 kickoff event, Gerald Chan — the donor whose gift allowed the establishment of MAD — highlighted the importance of not boiling design down to one singular design process. Rather, he wanted “all design processes to flourish.” This reflects MIT’s own mindset, which has resulted in many design processes taught across the Institute.

We recognized the possible gaps in our own backgrounds as architecture students: we are embedded in a very specific design pedagogy, and we didn’t know what blind spots we may have regarding other perspectives on design. Hoping to interact with a wider range of design disciplines, we set out to paint a picture of “design” through a series of interviews with professionals and academics involved in design to find out which skills they found most integral to their own work. We initially interviewed people from MIT, as well as professionals in the Boston and Cambridge area. We concluded each interview by asking the interviewee to recommend another designer for us to speak to, which resulted in just under 20 interviews with people as far as South Africa and India.

Despite our interviewees all having some link to the field of design, we suspected that asking them directly, “what is design?” would lead to formulaic answers. Thus, we began each interview with a very MIT-style question to prompt critical thinking in place of a quick response. Read more in our next article!

Have comments or thoughts about these articles? Email us as designpd[a]mit.edu.