© 1966, Bruno Munari, Design As Art

All men are designers.

All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.

Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto.

But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a back-lot baseball game, and educating a child.

Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order.

Design as a problem-solving activity can never, by definition, yield the one right answer: it will always produce an infinite number of answers, some ‘righter’ and some ‘wronger’. The Brightness’ of any design solution will depend on the meaning with which we invest the arrangement.

Design must be meaningful. And ‘meaningful’ replaces the semantically loaded noise of such expressions as ‘beautiful1, ‘ugly’, ‘cool’, ‘cute’, ‘disgusting’, ‘realistic’, ‘obscure’, ‘abstract’, and ‘nice’…

- Victor Papanek,
Design for the real world