Design is Intentionality

Design is intentionality.

Design informs how we use, understand, and value things. It dictates function, meaning, and price.

The designer is responsible for shaping and defining the utility of what we interact with. In this way, designers are among the most influential economic actors.

The work of a designer is to develop intention, and to manifest it in tangible form. Through each interface, transition, style, layout, etc. - the designer is deliberately manipulating our actions, motivations, emotions, thoughts, and desires. Designers orchestrate cohesive guides for the rest of us, formed by an aggregate of multi-sensory cues that we intuitively follow.

It is specifically the applied intent of the designer that inspires the products they create, and impact they have on the world and others. Their intention is what shapes their vision - creative, strategic, or utilitarian. It is also what distinguishes them, and makes them so powerful.

The best designers do not merely exercise their intent, but architect it. Their intent is not an emerging property, but a thoughtfully crafted one. They curate inspiration, emotion, and motivation as inputs to their intention function.

Designers who understand design perceive intentionality. It is what makes them so sensitive to the world around them. They see things as they are, how they were intended to be - and imagine what they could look like if their intentionality inspired them instead.

To observe the world as a designer is to observe intent. It is to see the ways in which things are constructed to influence us. Their lucidity and systematic vantage makes them particularly adept at discerning beauty, flaws, and opportunities where others do not.

We attribute the skills of a designer to problem solving. Problems solved by designers are not solved through direct solutions alone. They are solved by rethinking the intention that informed the problem in the first place.

There are many things to be said about what we can learn from designers. We would all benefit from bringing a little more intentionality into our lives.

Design is shaped by intention, and intention is shaped by design.

That is the practice.