Pilgrim believes a basic communication problem exists with the word "design" that prevents lay people from getting more engaged with it. "Nobody really understands what design is, or what a designer does," she insists. "Ask anyone on the street." She also maintains that the design profession is devoid of a single definition for its members' accomplishments. "Design professionals are always arguing about the meaning of design, it's an ongoing debate."

In search of linguistic pearls, I asked designer friends casually around dinner tables for a specific definition of their occupation. And I soon discovered that Pilgrim is absolutely right. At a dinner party hosted by noted graphic designer George Tscherny, two of his guests, Keith Gogard, an exhibition and graphic designer, and Gerald Gulatta, a product designer, concurred about meaning and said simultaneously, "Design means solving problems." "Beautifully," added Gulatta. This open-ended, non-specific phrase is confusing by its ambiguity. Problem-solving by designers is, after all, limited to tangible realities. I mean, no one goes to a designer to fix a broken heart.

At another dinner party, interior designer and architect Martha Burns, principal of NBBJ, claimed: "Design is a marriage of form and function." She laughed when I told her that the general public wouldn't have a clue as to what she meant. "Form" can mean a variety of things to a lay person. One of its most popular uses is to describe how a person is feeling, i.e., "I'm in top form today." It also is used in gambling lingo, i.e., "What's the racing form for Belmont track?" And we all know how boring it is to fill out forms. This is a far cry from the kind of "form" Burns is talking about. As to "function," this word usually describes a job or responsibility. After listening to Burns, Roger Whitehouse, an architect who also practices graphic and industrial design, declared that "design is about making things comfortable, and getting them to work." The delightful vagueness about this sentence reiterates Pilgrim's conviction about leaving the public guessing.

At the Cooper Hewitt Museum this past spring, Pilgrim mounted two shows simultaneously, which at first seemed at odds with each other, but on closer inspection had strong connection. The show on Renaissance drawing in Italy was about the beginning of "design" as we know it today. The other featured Henry Dreyfuss, the noted 20th-century industrial designer who "clean-lined" practically every object that we use today from teaspoons to telephones. Designers first came into existence during the Renaissance. They were people who could draw wonderful images of objects that they wanted artisans to make for them. Prior to this time, artisans had simply made things as they felt they should be, without the guidance of "disegno" -- plans or drawings. Pilgrim believes the beginning of this two-tier, artist-artisan system caused public confusion that has been ongoing ever since. And despite the phenomenal output of Dreyfuss, he is not the national hero he should be. Mostly people think that AT&T trimline phones -- a "very big" design breakthrough -- were designed by AT&T.

Design is not the only word that provokes debate in our language, of course. Take heaven. Everyone has a different notion of what it is. Webster says it's a celestial bliss. Is it somewhere up in the wide blue yonder, is it here on earth, or does it exist at all? It's a subject that defies a conclusive answer. Let's hope we don't have to wait to get to heaven, however, before we finally come up with a good definition of design.

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