What is design?

As a designer I feel I should write something about what I do. Basically most people confuse what I do (Industrial design/ product design) with making machines, or furniture or fashion. An industrial designer actually looks at how people do things and works out ways to make things better for them. The looking at how people do things is the most important bit. It is this that differentiates the designer from the engineer. The engineer looks at what works, for example things that have worked before, and makes a solution. This gives you lots of products that work well at what they do but are all very similar(see http://bit.ly/b2RNXJ). The designer looks at what people do (different to what they say they do) and comes up with something that works better because it is based on what they user does rather than on what everyone else made.