Fundamentally everything we do can be considered design and every person can be considered a designer. Even when talking about one’s life and daily habits, one can say it’s mostly design. Of course, you’ll have many constraints to your design, conscious or not, but it’s still design. Good or bad, it’s still design.
For example, even your commute to work is design and it can even be considered data-driven design. What you’re basically doing when deciding on your commute to work, is you’re designing your trip to work by choosing the route you take based on it’s parameters such as desired duration, the means of transport, the way you pay for the trip and so on. You design your morning commute based on an existing set of data and on a desired set of results.
Also, fundamentally everything around you is data. Even if you are an artist painting a picture of a landscape, what you’re basically doing is you are registering visual data that you perceive using your data collection sensors (your eyes) and you are processing that data to come up with a creative output, the painting.
Sometimes the data is apparent and sometimes it is less so, so the challenge in being a good designer is to be able to tell the difference between useful data and useless data. A large chunk of our work at Supersymmetric is separating the useful data from the useless data so that results have the best balance between business and user needs.
Basically everything that you do is data-driven and design is data, well structured, and logically ordered data.
Artwork: The Ambassadors • Hans Holbein the Younger