Design is at the heart of who we are – we are everyday designers.

‘Prod any happy person and you will find a project’ (Happiness: Lesson froma New Science Richard Layard London  Penguin 2006). We all need purpose in our lives, we need in some way to make our mark on the world, often in small but meaningful and significant ways. Making is Connecting, as Richard Gauntlett, is in a number of ways tied to connecting;

‘I mean this in three principle ways;

• Making is connecting because you have to connect things together (materials, ideas or both) to make something new;
• Making is connecting becvause acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension and connect us with other people;
• And making is connecting because through making things and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments.

However, beyond making, whether knitting, woodworking, building websites and son-on, there is something more fundamental at work. We all have what we can call ‘design abilities and sensibilities ‘ although we may not think of them in those terms. 

We are all aware of empathy as an important ability in human affairs. Putting yourself in someone elses shoes, or empathy, enables us to understand how we may best help those around us. I would suggest this is also a key design ability in that it helps us craft a way forward that will best support someone to find a solution. People who become professional designers also need empathy, but they have a more specialised knowledge and toolkit to increase their understanding of ‘users’ of products or services. 

Curiosity is another important ability, a disposition to take an interest in the world around us. Curiosity leads us to seek new learning opportunities through reading, joining clubs, meeting new people. Again, designers also need to be curious, but their curiosity is much more disciplined and focussed towards a specific design problem. 

There are other design abilities, visual imagination may be used to make things in our mind, supplementsted by sketching, physically arranging objects or even building a rough ‘prototype’, experimenting or trying things out to learn what options are available to solve a problem. All of these are design abilities, especially when applied in specific contexts such as community action and other forms of grassroots initiative. However, we also have various sensibilites, strong feelings in response to emotional or aesthetic stimuli, are also important in design.

Design sensbilities are about feeling and perception and include an innate sense of balance, harmony, order or wholness. Psychology highlights a number of innate sensibilities; Gestalt Theory states that we seek harmony and organisation, prioritising the whole (the gestalt) rather than the components from which it is made, therefore ‘whe whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, the search for meaning and in some ways a story to allow connections to be made and support understanding.

Why is seeing ourselves as ‘everyday designers’ important? Design is pervasive, extending across everyday objects, organisations, government and the largley hidden infrastructure that shapes our world. I would argue that it is crucial that we participate in every opportunity to help design the world in which we live and seek out and develop our own opportunties. We are everyday designers and can take part in developing our own community as a starting point.