Design is everywhere - and that's why looking for a definition may not help you grasp what it is. Design is everywhere. It's what drew you to the last piece of furniture you bought and it's what made online banking possible.It's made London taxi cabs easier to get in and out of and it made Stella McCartney's name. It's driving whole business cultures and making sure environments from hospitals to airports are easier to navigate. The single word 'design' encompasses an awful lot, and that's why the understandable search for a single definition leads to lengthy debate to say the least. There are broad definitions and specific ones - both have drawbacks. Either they're too general to be meaningful or they exclude too much. One definition, aired by designer Richard Seymour during the Design Council's Design in Business Week 2002, is 'making things better for people'. It emphasises that design activity is focused first and foremost on human behaviour and quality of life, not factors like distributor preferences. But nurses or road sweepers could say they, too, 'make things better for people'. Meanwhile, a definition focused on products or 3D ealisations of ideas excludes the work of graphic designers, service designers and many other disciplines. There may be no absolute definitions of design that will please everyone, but attempting to find one can at least help us pin down the unique set of skills that designers bring to bear. Translation Design could be viewed as an activity that translates an idea into a blueprint for something useful, whether it's a car, a building, a graphic, a service or a process. The important part is the translation of the idea, though design's ability to spark the idea in the first place shouldn't be overlooked. Scientists can invent technologies, manufacturers can make products, engineers can make them function and marketers can sell them, but only designers can combine insight into all these things and turn a concept into something that's desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people's lives. There are many misconceptions about design. Sunday supplements and glossy magazines often use 'design' as a buzzword denoting style and fashion. While the toaster or corkscrew being featured may be well designed, the result is to feed the belief of would-be design clients that design is restricted to the surface of things and how they look, and that it's best employed at the end of the product development process. But good design isn't simply about the surface. Aesthetics are important, but only a part of a bigger picture. Design is fundamental. People often need reminding that everything around us is designed and that design decisions impact on nearly every part of our lives, be it the environments we work in, the way we book holidays, or the way we go about getting get the lid off the jam jar. When those things work, it's taken for granted, but, as Bill Moggridge, founder of international consultancy IDEO, says: 'A lot of trial and error goes into making things look effortless.' Design and the user Good design begins with the needs of the user. No design, no matter how beautiful and ingenious, is any good if it doesn't fulfil a user need. This may sound obvious but many products and services, such as the Sinclair C5, Wap mobile phone services, and a great many dot com businesses failed because the people behind them didn't grasp this. Finding out what the customer wants is the first stage of what designers do. The designer then builds on the results of that inquiry with a mixture of creativity and commercial insight. Although gut instinct is part of the designer's arsenal, there are more scientific ways of making sure the design hits the mark. Different designers use different methods - combining market research, user testing, prototyping and trend analysis. http://www.ttthings.com/images/uploads/shop_poster_you_can_take_that_01.jpg