Thinking more about "design is making decisions" leaves me unsatisfied with differentiating design from other fields.

Perhaps user-centered design is a decision making process (superior to many others) but it's still inextricable from its artifacts in a way that others aren't.

Design is not the final product - engineers and their machines will hew that from bits of code or plastic or steel. But if design is decision-making about that product, then it must effectively communicate with & influence those engineers in order to make the decision stick.

I constantly come back to a very smart thing @camerontw said about design mediating behavior through objects.

I think that's what really lies at the core of design's power - the design artifact may be documentation, but it is much better at influencing at scale.

When I document a design decision about the product - in other words, create a design artifact - I create an extension of myself that can be present anywhere, and influences anywhere it's present. It's not documenting the past, like a spreadsheet, but a desired future state.

Information only becomes knowledge when it migrates from storage into brains. Decisions only become design when they migrate from brains into artifacts - or perhaps from artifacts into products. After all, an artifact that isn't heeded is ultimately not a decision.

We're mostly trained to render the artifact, and sometimes to make good decisions before rendering it, but a design artifact is not just communicating, it's persuading. It is ultimately an argument, and we should be training designers to be better at influencing orgs as well.

This, of course, is the flipside of the issue. Energy spent on artifacts is energy not spent on making better decisions instead. When design isn't seen as decision-making, colleagues don't see the problem.

In an ideal world, artifacts are minimal. https://mobile.twitter.com/miniver/status/1171093753391509505

The key disadvantage of Design working on heavy, high-fidelity artifacts is that Biz/Eng is never similarly encumbered. While designers are off proving their their decisions are right, Biz/Eng make poor decisions quickly (based on gut feel) & build the wrong things.

"Research/design is too slow"
"We already built it, we can't change it now"
"There's no room for this on the roadmap"
"This design is too much work, cut the scope"

These are symptoms of decisions being made without research, because design is seen as "frosting" and not "cake"

This is actually a super-good point.

Design that is visibly backed by research is much more resilient than HIPPO-style direction in turbulent situations. https://twitter.com/UXinKC/status/1174367870157021185