Design: A Practical Take

In Launching the Imagination, Mary Stewart spells out the difference between art and design for all of us who like to go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on what the difference is.

Design solves a problem, and art makes one.

To me, this idea is rather hard to grasp, or at least it is hard to understand why it even matters.  However, I just had a stroke of genius enlightenment, and will bestow upon you a wonderfully practical take on the argument.  First of all, Stewart defines the questions designers ask at the begining of a new design task, which are essentially the proof that designers are solving an established problem:

What do we need?

What existing designs are similar to the design we need?

What is the difference between the existing designs and the new designs?

How can we transform, combine, or expand these exisiting designs?

So, here's the practical example: headphones.  I've been doing a serious amount of review-reading on headphones because I finally decided I needed to get a pair after a year of saying I would and not actually deciding which one I thought was the best.  Headphone reviews are quite enlightening, because they talk about the difference between all different types of headphones on a highly technical level, and in comparison to others.  This is the same process that happens in design, at least for me and the people I know.  When designing something, my analysis of the design is highly technical, determing if any little piece of the product has a flaw or looks out of place or strange.  And throughout the process, I am constantly looking at similar design styles, products, and the rest of the line I'm creating, to determine if the design is going in the right direction.

With headphone design, what do we need is a question that I would think is asked last, so I'll skip that and come back.  So say the problem is, your company is competing with Beats, so you need to make something that is better than their headphones.  What existing designs are similar to the anti-beats design we need?  Find other companies who are in high regard and rate well in comparison to beats.  What is the difference between the existing designs and the new designs?  That is, what is the difference between those headphones we just looked into and our ideas for our headphone design?  Once those are defined... how can we transform, combine, or expand these exisiting designs?  In other words, how can we bridge the gap between our headphone design and those successful anti-beats headphones to come out on top?  Then finally, what do we need to accomplish this?

There you have it, the problem-solving designer in a practical life-application.  :)  Here are my headphones with a review attached, just for fun.