We all do design, whether it’s figuring out what's for dinner, creating a social media post or building a bridge.

Engaging in a design process involves traversing through a set of design activities.

As a person engages in a design process, over time, they enact design activities in an order that makes sense for the particular project they're engaging in.

A design signature is a tracing of the activities a designer engaged in over time. The original design process is typically invisible, but as we make a tracing, we can make the invisible process into a visible representation.

The dictionary definition of a signature is: "a person's name written in a distinctive way as a form of identification (Oxford Languages).

When we sign our name, our signatures change over time and context. A person's name stays the same, but their signature when they first learn to write is different from their formal signature as an adult, which is also different from the signature they use to buy a cup of coffee on an electronic device.

Just like our signatures of our names, a design signature is different for design projects with different contexts. Sometimes designers do a lot of research to understand the situation, sometimes designers jump in and start creating solutions right away. Sometimes they may finish prototyping and decide to return to ideation to generate more ideas for other prototypes or go straight to production.

A design signature can be a literal representation. Design activities can either be captured during the design process itself, or can be estimated from memory after the design process is over. This data can then be displayed in a timeline representation to see the pattern of design activities the designer engaged in over time during their design process.

A design signature can be an interpretive representation. In this case, the designer captures or remembers their design process and makes an abstract representation of attributes that are meaningful to them.

Making invisible design signatures visible enables designers to reflect on their own design process and answer questions for themselves. In this way, designers can build their design awareness.

Design signatures (both literal and interpretive representations) can be compared to each other and compared to outside representations to notice patterns. Designers can then determine whether they would like to change their future design processes, and how they might change them.

To illustrate, design timelines captured from expert designers have been shown to have different patterns of design activity than novice designers. A designer may choose to have their future design processes look more like an expert’s design process than a novice process.

Designers can engage in design metacognition, or thinking about their design processes overall. This could include using their design signatures to help guide their future design activities, to monitor how they're engaging in design processes while they're in the middle of the process, and evaluate how they did after the process is over.

Designers can reflect on who they want to be as a designer and what kind of design signature they would like to leave when they engage in future design processes. This can be called their aspirational design signature.

A secondary dictionary definition of signature is: "a distinctive pattern, product or characteristic by which someone or something can be identified” (Oxford Language.)

From this secondary definition of “signature”, a design signature could also be used to indicate an aspirational version of a design signature a designer would like to leave behind as they engage in future design projects. In this website we will use the term “design signature” when we are referring to literal or interpretive representations of a design process, and we will use the term “aspirational design signature” when we are referring to future design signatures.