Design resists a single definition because it is both an action and an outcome, a process and a result. I define it as the tangible translation of strategy: creating with intent.

My first design professor, Michael Stinson, had a saying. "A thinking designer is a working designer." I return to it often. In every course I teach, I ask students to approach their work with intent and reason, and to be able to articulate both.

A second idea guides me. Victor Papanek opened Design for the Real World with the line "There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them." I think about that sentence constantly, because design is entering an inflection point at least as consequential as the one desktop publishing created. Artificial intelligence, political instability, climate change, and global inequality all impact the profession, and the profession plays a role in how these realities impact humanity now and in the future. Students should graduate aware that their work carries consequences beyond the design file.

With those ideas in mind, I ask my students three questions. How do you want to show up as a designer? What role do you want your work to play inside a larger organizational and business system? How do you want your creative voice to survive the structures you will sometimes be required to work within?

I try to answer those questions by building a classroom that is both creative and business-oriented, where students can be curious, ask questions, explore, and fail, while learning to connect that work to the systems design shapes and is shaped by. I do this by translating real projects that I have experienced to classroom projects and exercises.

I believe design history and design theory belong in design education, balanced against execution. Tools and tactics deserve their place, but they become far more powerful when taught alongside context: the world design operates in, and the history of the practice itself.

I want students to leave my courses with both excitement and awareness about what design is capable of. Despite the profession's failures, I believe design wielded with positive intent can change the world for the better. I want a role in preparing the designers who will wield it.