Design is intentional alteration of reality
September 28, 2026design, design thinking4 min read
Design is the intentional alteration of reality.
Put more simply, it's turning a current situation into a preferred one by introducing something new. That something can be a product, a service, a behaviour, or a whole system. Herbert Simon, in his book The Sciences of the Artificial, said something similar back in 1969:
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
1/ Everything around you was decided by someone
Design is everywhere, and most of it has nothing to do with how things look. The queue at your bank, the form at your ward office, the order of apps on your phone. Someone made decisions about how each of these works, and those decisions are design.
And the important word in the definition above is "intentional." Reality gets altered all the time without anyone meaning to. Design is when you do it on purpose, and you take responsibility for what happens after.
2/ The researcher, the designer and the engineer
There are roughly three ways to engage with a problem.
The researcher wants to understand reality as it is. Observe, measure, explain. Truth is the goal.
The designer imagines what reality could be, and works out how to get there from here.
The engineer builds the thing once the plan is known. Starts from a spec and optimizes toward it.
The same person can be all three, and it's even easier to wear all three hats today. Starting from a spec works well when a spec exists. But a lot of the problems worth solving don't come with one.
3/ You learn a situation by poking it
Think of it as a loop: knowing, thinking and acting. You grasp the situation (the reality you are in), its constraints (what's there, and the characteristics of it) and its people (the users, stakeholders and people affected). You form an interpretation of what's going on. You intervene. And because intervening changes the situation, you have to know it again. The loop keeps turning for as long as the problem is alive.
A designer never works alone (even though we'd love to). You're constantly dealing with other designers, stakeholders, users, materials, budgets and the physical world. As those interactions pile up, new opportunities and constraints keep appearing. And with every interactions, the reality changes, so does new situations. You learn and iterate.
4/ Your perspective decides the answer
I like this intro exercise from IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking course: draw a flower vase, then draw how you'd enjoy flowers.
The vase almost always comes out as a container. Taller, wider, patterned, glass, but a container. Look at it from the perspective of "enjoying flowers," though, and you can end up with anything: flowers pressed in a book, photos, window boxes, flowers given away, gardens and whatnot. The shift in perspective does all the work. And that's what design thinking is about: taking a broader look at the situation (reality), so you can change it (alter) into a preferred one (intentionally).
5/ It's always about the experience
IBM's course also defines design thinking as a problem-solving approach that aims to improve people's experiences. I bring this up because every intentional alteration aims at improving someone's experience. When we design something, we're always thinking about how it makes things better for the people using it.
6/ Design thinking in the era of AI
With AI, the distance between an idea and a working thing seems to have almost disappeared. What used to take weeks is just one prompt away.
But look at the five phases of design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. AI has almost made us jump straight to the fourth phase. The designer's forte, empathizing with the user and ideating better solutions, is still where we humans excel. The part that got faster is the engineer (prototype) part.
I think this is also why AI slop exists. Anyone can build a product now, including people who never had to think about design before. But the research and design parts, going out and finding out what's actually true and deciding what should exist, still take far more time than the building. Because building is cheap now, people skip straight to it. Mostly because we already think we know the right solution to the problem worth solving.
And if we look at our earlier definition, AI has made altering reality cheap, but the intentional part is still on us.
I think design thinking is more needed than ever when AI has compressed our process so much, we are just building a feature factory of things nobody needs.