The first thing you need to know about design is that it’s a huge category with a number of definitions.

There are many ways to categorize the field of design. Organizing it by design jobs is the way it’s framed here. It’s not perfect, but it is a good starting place:

• People who design things like cars, bikes, furniture, tools and equipment, computers, medical devices, housewares and toys. They are called industrial designers.

• People who design the clothes and fabrics you see in stores. They are generally called fashion designers or textile designers.

• People who design spaces and places you live in, work in, eat in and play in. Urban planners design cities and big development projects. Landscape architects design outdoor environments like neighborhoods and parks. Architects design buildings of all types, and interior designers design the look and feel and details of spaces inside the buildings, usually in collaboration with architects.

• People who design the graphics that you see in websites, computer apps, magazines, books, packaging, signs, etc. They are called graphic designers, communication designers and interaction designers.

• People who design service experiences for other people, such as the way you experience a ride in a theme park, the way you experience a hospital emergency room, or the way an online store helps you to compare options, rate favorites, make purchases and check-out. These people are called service designers or user experience (UX) designers.

The second thing to know about design is what designers do. Looking at what a designer does from a process perspective, designers:

• Help define the problem they are solving by researching and learning about the people who use the product or service, their needs and goals.

• Brainstorm and create lots of possible ways to solve the problem.

• Sketch, illustrate, diagram or find another way to communicate their ideas visually (as well as verbally).

• Build prototypes to see if their ideas work. They might be rough models made from stuff lying around the house or office; nice graphics printed from your computer; storyboards like in comic books, describing the way something happens; computer models or animations; or fancy hand-built or machine-built models.

• Test their ideas among the people the design is meant to serve to find out whether they like it and to explore any ways in which it could be improved.

• Refine their design until it is ready to be developed further, sometimes working with engineering specialists, manufacturing specialists or business specialists.

You might have heard about "Design Thinking" and wonder why more people involved in the product development process talk about it? Design thinking is a mindset that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to help organizations innovate . To learn more about it, I invite you to visit IDEO's, an global award-winning design firm.