As a child, I loved to watch cars pass by in front of the house I grew up in. I was fascinated by the shapes: why did one look cool and another rather bland? That was the beginning of many years admiring automotive design, a journey that led me to the work of automotive designers such as Bruno Sacco, Frank Stephenson, and Joji Nagashima.

As I grew up, I found in music a channel for my excess energy, and started learning many aspects of it over the years, from playing and composing to production. This is where I learnt how form meets function, a continuation of the car-design fascination. Even though I’m a drummer, I drooled over guitars made by Grover Jackson, with the reversed pointy headstock so many Glam Metal guitarists used back then. The same went for many other audio and recording consoles, which fascinated me for their function and form. For me, a musical instrument is a functional art form.

I was intrigued by how these designers, behind the tangible forms I admired, could produce them. It was a long journey that led me to understand that a designer is a person who translates human need into form that can be built.

That definition has three parts.

Human need. The starting point: the actual need of an actual person the work is meant to serve, not the brief as written, the feature request, or the stated business objective.
Form. The output: not just a visual or an interface, but the specific shape, behaviour, and logic that makes the need addressable.
That can be built. The constraint that separates form from wish: a designer who envisions solutions their team cannot produce has not designed anything. They have speculated.

This echoes Herbert Simon’s framing of design as “devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”¹ The H3 definition follows Simon’s lead, defining design by what it does, and adds what Simon’s framing leaves open. Simon describes a course of action. H3 describes the person capable of running it. The question shifts from “what is the design process?” to “what must the designer be capable of?”

Simon is not alone in the lineage H3 inherits from. Victor Papanek, in Design for the Real World (1971), defined design as “the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.” He argued that the designer’s first obligation was to human need, and that industry came second. That framing treats Heart as a mode of practice. Charles Eames, in a 1969 interview at the Louvre, offered the economical version: “a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.” Three definitions with different angles of approach, one shared perspective: design is defined by what it does for human beings.

H3’s contribution is a decomposition: human need, form, buildability become Heart, Hand, Head, the three modes of the practitioner who must hold all three to do any of it well.

The shift from definition to capacity is where the three parts start being developmental. Human need requires the capacity to understand real people accurately, through disciplined contact instead of assumption or intuition. Form requires the capacity to make something well: to take understanding and give it a shape that another person can encounter and use. That can be built requires the capacity to think in systems: to understand what is possible, what is likely, and what the tradeoffs are.

These three capacities do not develop at the same rate. Most designers can identify which one they lead with and which is weakest. H3 is built on the observation that all three should develop together, and that most designers stall because one of the three is limiting the other two.

Do

Write a one-sentence definition of what you do that includes all three terms: need, form, buildability.

Check

Can someone outside design read it and tell what you would refuse to work on?

1. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed., MIT Press, 1996. Chapter 5, “The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial,” p. 111. In it Simon makes the founding academic case that design is a rigorous intellectual discipline in its own right, with standing equal to science or the humanities. ↩

First Principleswhat a designer is actually accountable for