The degree to which we are designers is the degree to which we can recognize and decipher the design around us. If you’ve ever set a table, then you’ve created design. It’s not necessarily art, and it’s not necessarily commercial, but it is design. Design is moving something from an existing state to a preferred one. That something could be an idea, a message, a color or a shape. That something is an element of language; a form of articulation.

We’re all of us like tourists in a foreign country. At first, we can’t speak the language. The signs tell us nothing, and the sounds we hear are strange. The words are unfamiliar and we have to point at what we want like children. After a while, however, we start to pick things up. Words that were once unrecognizable now begin to make sense, gain meaning to us.

As we start to learn the language of this foreign place, it begins to be less foreign. We know where to turn right, where to go straight. We begin to understand where the train station is from the signposts that say where it is. We see the address numbers and they make sense. The map is readable.

Well, design is like that. When we begin to speak the language of design, when we start to understand how the various and previously unintelligible forms combine now to show intention, and meaning, we begin to take control, take ownership of our surroundings.