Innovative Design

Innovative Design is Not Art –
Or Is It?

Innovative design should be interconnected. There are many facets to creating designs and they incorporate the designer, management, production and customer experiences. Good innovative design is an activity, not a phase

Innovative design that works well is invisible and is utterly unsurprising, except when it lets you do something more easily than you expected. Such design is something you don't notice has been designed at all, because it works exactly as you expected it to. It is like a comfortable old jumper; it should not be perfect. This is where designers often ‘get it wrong’, they try to get their design to a point of perfection that sometimes even goes against the very outcome the design is meant to achieve.

Innovative design is not achieved by endlessly refining one thing, but rather by continuously tweaking the process by which the thing is made. It is the manufacturing or production of the design that often needs changing – rather than the design itself.

The innovative design of software is an interesting process, as it requires a lot more forethought than other software endeavours such as coding. Software design is by its very nature a tangible representation of a thought, or a collection of thought processes. This specialised innovative design of software is an interactive, ongoing, changing process.

There are indeed many disciplines of innovative design and most are to do with functionality of the finished product. In the classic engineering disciplines like Civil Engineering, design is the activity that leads to what is referred to as architecture and implementation.

Many believe that the highest accolade we can bestow on innovative design is not that it is beautiful, as we do in art, but that it is well-used. This is why design is so related to technology; and because technology changes so quickly, so must our designs.

Innovative design is something that works well. But there is a strong voice in the community that insists that all design is art. However, we would all do well to remember that, like most things in life, good innovative design is all about balance. It is no more correct to say ‘design is not art’ than to say ‘art is not design’.

If a design is ‘ugly’ and does not have an artistic ‘beauty’ to it, users may be distracted by the ugliness, or feel less interested in using it. I would go so far as to say innovative design that is solely functional is not really design in the true sense, because design is not functionality; rather it is a rare form of communication. Functionality is not art, but communication through design is. Innovative design is more than a flow, feature, or visual language – it has to leave an imprint on our ‘sole’.