My short answer to a fre­quent ques­tion:
How do you define what you do?”

Design is first and fore­most an intel­lec­tual process. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, design­ers are not artists. They employ artis­tic meth­ods to visu­al­ize think­ing and process, but, unlike artists, they work to solve a client’s prob­lem, not present their own view of the world. If a design project, how­ever, is to be con­sid­ered suc­cess­ful – and that would be the true mea­sure of qual­ity – it will not only solve the prob­lem at hand, but also add an aes­thetic dimen­sion beyond the prag­matic issues.

I con­sider design not to be a series of “cre­ative” one-offs, but an inte­grated process, from plan­ning the appro­pri­ate com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy to design­ing func­tional and beau­ti­ful objects as well as – for exam­ple – imple­ment­ing elec­tronic sta­tionery on clients’ systems.

What clients say and what design­ers hear are too often very dif­fer­ent things. Design is a pow­er­ful tool to help clar­ify the prob­lem. It is only when a com­mon under­stand­ing has been estab­lished between client and designer that effec­tive results can be
achieved.

Design qual­ity needs an inte­grated approach: look more closely than expected, ask many ques­tions, think lat­er­ally, get involved in things you shouldn’t, do more than you are sup­posed to and have fun doing it. Prob­lem solv­ing is one thing, aes­thetic plea­sure another. Com­bine the two, make the engi­neer sketch like an artist and make the artist ana­lyze like an engi­neer, and you are half-way there.