There are a lot of words, artifacts, and talks that aim to articulate what design is, and how to practice it.
The profuse amount of words, artifacts, and talks created ends up over-boiling the what and how to a point that it becomes a grey to black box for non practitioners.
In reality the essence of design isn’t difficult to unpack. There are new frameworks created every other week that tries to simplify—which ironically ends up complicating further. There are also myriads of boot camps, and courses that aim to teach the fundamentals of design for folks who are interested in the field.
The simplest articulate/framework in my opinion is the design councils 4 Ds , which is commonly known as the double diamond.
That still to a degree makes design seem complex.
The best way I aim to articulate the what and how design operates to anyone who’s interested is: Design is a lot of gathering and listening to multiple sources to form an opinion. Once you have an opinion via synthesizing the data, it’s then articulating/communicating an opinion through design.
Aside: depending on context collaboration with multiple parties occurs throughout the entire process.
That’s it. Gather, understand, synthesis, create, and share it with the world to validate (or invalidate) your opinion/hypothesis.
I’ll go as far as to say this is applicable to all forms of design. There’s always a discover, defining, design, and development stage.