Questions are essential to design. I mean that literally: questions are the essence of design. In my more passionate moments, I’d say that doing design is indistinguishable from asking questions. Engaging in the design process yields, at its conclusion, a product – something that people use and hopefully find some value. And the path to that conclusion – the process – is paved with questions.
Humanity has been engaged in design throughout its lifespan, but it’s perhaps only more recently that we’re sought to define the process of design. It’s helpful to explain to those around you – who might also be participating the design process – what it entails. It’s useful for planning, to know what steps you’ll take. It’s how to confidently reproduce earlier success, to repeat the process. And to explain it, to plan it, or to repeat it, you have to know what the process is.
But it’s the lack of definition, the absence of a clear set of steps, that makes design so versatile. It solves problems not because it makes use of rote procedures. It solves problems because it is an approach that can be adapted to many situations. More than just a collection of tools and techniques: design is also a mindset: a frame of mind that drives designers to look at the world afresh, to engage in experimentation, and to listen to a wide range of perspectives. I’ve previously encapulated this mindset as comnbining curiousity, skepticism, and humility.
At the heart of this approach, at the intersection of these three aspects of the mindset, is the question. And that is why I say design is indistinguishable from questions.
Earlier I said that the design process yields at its conclusion a product of value and utility. Designers of all stripes will see the fallacy of that statement. Design never really has a conclusion. It has, instead, a series of convenient (or inconvenient) places to pause. What goes into a product is a collection of assertions about how the product looks and behaves: design decisions. Those decisions didn’t come from the ether. They came from deliberation. They came from considering questions – big ones like “what problem are we trying to solve?” and small ones like “what should the label on this button say?”; complex ones like “how should we model the domain” and fraught ones like “which user group is most important”. Answers yield more questions and yet somehow, whether through grit and resilience or miracle and luck, we design stuff.