Design is a craft, part Art and part Science (both terms used in the most general sense). It is the way you get from wanting something that doesn't exist to having it, and it sounds deceptively easy when written quickly, like that!

The design process involves establishing the requirements (and how we will decide whether they have been met), thinking about it, deciding how we will do it, doing it, and testing it. It is an iterative process, which means that when we come across a problem, we go back to the point where the problem is introduced, and fix it before we continue. When the requirements have been met, the design is complete.

The layman understands people like Pierre Cardin and Vivian Westwood to be designers, and they are. But engineers and architects (for example) are designers too.

What's great about design being such a cross-disciplinary thing is that we can learn from each other. For example, the software design community has - since the mid '90s - taken on board 'software patterns' (http://hillside.net/patterns/patterns.html) based on the patterns work of architect (and visionary) Christopher Alexander (http://www.patternlanguage.com).

As the h2g2 Editors correctly observed in this entry's first Rejection: "This Entry merely defines Design as a concept without going into any of the many theories and methodologies that surround the topic." There are a near-infinite number of design methods, many of them specific to a particular discipline. This Entry starts and ends at the level of abstraction where Leonardo de Vinci, Frank Lloyd-Wright and Donatella Versace are members of the same group: designers.

This Entry says what design is. I leave it to others to expand upon the Great Designers, their Great Designs and the Great Design Methods that have been employed across the fields of human endeavour since time immemorial. If I have awakened in you, the reader, even the slightest trace of interest in design, that's enough for me. I am content.