I believe to design is to choose. Choosing what to do when you have overwhelming but insufficient information. Because as a designer, I find myself making choices at every step.
Choose between what needs to be done and what you ought to do. Choose to focus on your weakness or choose to stay in your comfort zone. Choose to say you can’t work with a person or choose to understand them. Choose to learn about users through conversation or choose to learn about them from that article posted on forbes.com. Choose to speak up in a meeting or choose to stay quiet despite having thousands of words to say. Choose to give critical feedback which can improve a design or choose to focus on the superficial.
What you design is a manifestation of what you choose.
Imagine being a web search engine company in California and you choose to only have your logo and a textbox on the homepage when your competitors have more ads than the superbowl on their homepage. Imagine being a tractor manufacturer in Italy and you choose to make supercars because you believe you understand people better than Ferrari does. Imagine being at a children's hospital in Pittsburg and you choose to design an adventurous CT scan experience for children, a choice which would bring smiles to everyone in the room.
On the other hand, Choose to design a social platform where everyone screams out the highlights of their lives as they hurt deep down inside. Choose to design maps for navigation and realize that without their phone, a person has no clue where north is. Choose to design the next generation wearable without thinking about the mountains of electronic-waste across the planet. Choose to design a way for people to express their emotions by reducing all one can feel into six neatly placed reactions.
Human interaction reduced to nothing but data.
Choose to stay on the hard high ground above or choose to step into the swamp of real world issues. As a designer you choose the future. This I Believe.