The Many Courses in Design
A design is an abstract or general description or plan of the arrangement of something on a physical level or for the execution of some activity or procedure, or the end result of which plan or specification in the shape of a model, product or machine, or something of this sort. The word design itself however is usually used in contexts of art, where the term refers to the creation of artistic works. In design therefore one ends up talking about the systematic arrangement of matter on the physical level. A designer may be asked to design things like furniture, clothes, architecture, and so on. In a broader sense however, the term design also encompasses the whole range of sciences dealing with the arrangement of matter, including computer science and engineering, and so on.
The discipline of architecture is one of the branches that have a number of design approaches. Architecture is an artistic genre of building construction that seeks to maximize the effectiveness of the space given to it. A number of architectural design approaches are utilized in the construction and designing of buildings such as structural design, site-specific design, energy consumption optimization, and construction financing. The disciplines of industrial design and graphic design also deal with the layout of objects on the physical level.
Product design pertains to the systematic description and the determination of the qualities of a product according to their various physical attributes and market demand. In product design the role of designers is divided between those belonging to different disciplines that attempt to describe the specific attributes of a product. A good example is the clash between industrial design and product design. Industrial design pertains to those practices employed by architects, and product design to those practices employed by marketing experts. Designers involved in product design to analyze the market data and take into account the various costs of production before determining the pricing of the product.