my thoughts exactly. 

(This is for a design contest, though, which means 99% of anyone who could be educated by and receptive to this message — ie, “non-designers” like yours truly — won’t be.)

Update:

Actually I’d go further and reject the idea that design is an aesthetic at all. That’s why so many people think this whenever they hear the word. Design is creative problem-solving with a strategic purpose. It’s “why” before “how”, “should” plus “could,” the preferable over the merely possible: making things make sense. That’s it. It’s not an “aesthetic” any more than engineering or science is. It’s part of the basic experience of being human — and I’d go so far as to say that we were designers before we were engineers, scientists, farmers, or anything else that we are. The monolith in 2001 didn’t make that bone-toting ape any smarter. It turned him into a designer. And everything changed.

Designers brought down mammoths and tamed wild horses, built Rome and sacked Troy, split the atom and reached the moon — as well as a whole host of other ignoble, foolish, delightful and mundane things. They didn’t all call themselves “designers”, and they were many other things as well, but that’s what they were doing. And that’s what anyone is doing whenever he or she is functioning above the level of stimulus/response lizard-brain instincts. We are designers because we have souls, and vice versa. And so are you.