I am part-way through Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience, and I’ve read part of the Experience Economy, and of course my course last year on Experience Design.  Add to that the UK’s Design Council finding that businesses that use design thinking and methods are more successful than their counterparts.  Of course I am totally fascinated by what is happening with NextD, and using design to inquire and innovate.

Certainly F@astCompany and BusinessWeek have both picked up on the idea of design, but I’m surprised that this isn’t more widely talked about.

Now add to the mix some of the papers that have come out of the HCI community of practice about research through design and I start wonder. It seems like design is being used in all kinds of disparate contexts, so disparate I wonder if there is any unifying thread to what is being called design?

I of course turn to Nelson & Stolterman‘s The Design Way for answers.  They want the book to explain what design is, to instill design culture and design thinking, and I hope to find at least a preliminary answer to my question in this rereading of the question.

If I can answer more simply what design is in all these contexts, I would like to answer the question that has been riddling me for months now: what is the philosophical basis of design (if indeed it has one)? What can research by design rightly say?

All this come back to my original start point, how does design methodology and thinking really impact business? What is it that moves forward like so many think it does?  I think it has something to do with what design is, and where it comes from theoretically.