Product designers should be concentrating on getting the name back more from artists than from social planners

It's been quite amusing in 2005 to see wider media coverage about "design" and what it is. A new initiative from the UK's Design Council this week to "improve national life through design" provoked one national newspaper to explain that there's a whole new wave of design out there which deals with services and business models, and this is causing "shock to the design world".

This attitude, however, comes from people who think that design is about catwalks and posters, and there are rather a lot of those folks out there, many in positions of influence, academic or otherwise. They would take it as read that designing anything has to start with a charcoal sketch. You and I, on the other hand, probably get just a tiny bit irritated if the public's idea of a designer is not someone who actually thinks about how the product is going to be made, or maintained, or even how it will operate. We might politely say: "I think you're referring to a stylist, or an artist, not a designer".

So I suspect many engineering designers will feel more in common with some of these "new designers" working on intangible things such as services and business models, than they do with clothes stylists or graphic artists. I've always considered working out production flows through a plant to be as much of a true design challenge as work involving mechanics. According to the same newspaper report, the new Master of the Faculty for Royal Designers for Industry criticised these "new designers" by saying it is "very worrying that the term designer is so abused. Can we please have our name back?" I'd agree. But I think product designers should be concentrating on getting the name back more from artists than from social planners.