The most uncomfortable task I have to undertake at a party is explaining to strangers what I do. When asked, I say that I’m studying industrial design, which usually elicits the self-consciously stiff look of an interlocutor staring down impending boredom: “Oh, so  . . .  you make, like, packaging?”

Yes, that’s part of it, and now I’m screwed.

The smart thing for me to do in this situation would be to explain the specifics of my day-to-day in concrete terms: drawing up plans, building models and prototypes, opaque brainstorming rituals involving ecologically unconscionable quantities of post-it notes, and so forth. But anyone who has attended design school experiences a compulsive urge to describe “design” as designers typically see it, which is as an abstract strategic process completely independent from any specific subfield or practice.