Are you a designer?

The answer has little to do with your job title.

Designers are people who make a point of interacting with the world in a way that creates deliberate change.

If you’ve ever planned a meeting, watered your garden, or helped someone smile, you’ve engaged in design.

These may be examples of small interventions, but they’re distinct from the random consequences of everyday life because they were motivated by a subjective belief about how reality might be improved.

Regardless of your profession or the scale of your work, you’re a designer if you contribute with a sense of intent and a desire to make things better.

In today’s highly specialized world, most educational pathways don’t offer exposure to the patterns of thinking that enable design success. This is a tragedy because design is an essential part of so many roles on which society depends. 

The good news is that designing well is probably more a matter of skill than talent, and that means we can all get better at it.