Working definition. Design is the shaping of relations between intention, form, behaviour, and consequence. It makes a proposition tangible enough to encounter.
Inherited meaning
Design joins two inheritances: drawing something forth in the mind and giving it a mark in the world. Modern industry often separated conception from manufacture, then reduced design to appearance. Its more complete tradition includes systems, services, interfaces, institutions, and every deliberate condition that guides experience.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI can render forms before their purpose has matured. Design therefore moves upstream. Its task is not to decorate generated outputs, but to frame the right problem, compose constraints, preserve human agency, and make values operational. A beautiful artifact can be poorly designed if the relation it creates is careless or coercive.
What changes in practice
Write the intended human change before specifying the artifact. Prototype the relation, not only the screen. Evaluate what the design invites repeatedly, whose agency it expands, and what becomes harder because it exists.