Every day, design influences our lives in many ways. The office we work in and the phone we use are both products of design. Consider that the park we walk through, the bench we sit on, and the signs we read have all been designed to meet a specific need. Many of us can easily recognize poor design while we often take good design for granted. We expect a chair to be comfortable and notice when it is not. We expect packaging to sufficiently inform us about what we are buying and we notice when it doesn’t.

While we have all come to expect good design, we often overlook the fact that many hours of work went into the design of a particular product or space. Design not only improves our quality of life but also provides employment for almost 50,000 Canadians.

Effective, innovative design is a critical factor for economic growth. Through the application of sound design practices, design practitioners are able to increase the value of products, services, communications and physical spaces, while at the same time reduce costs, improve efficiency and increase productivity.

The Design Services industry includes four distinct disciplines: industrial design; communication design; interior design; and landscape architecture.

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN includes activity related to the design and development of commercial and industrial products.

COMMUNICATION DESIGN utilizes visual information to aid communication and orientation; it encompasses graphic design, multimedia and computer interface design.

INTERIOR DESIGNERS are designers of the built environment. This discipline is concerned with the modification, adaptation or re-creation for human use of our internal environment.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS are also designers of the built environment and focus on those processes influencing our physical or external environment.

Architects are also designers of the built environment and they frequently collaborate on projects with the other design subsectors.

Design in Canada

The Canadian design industry has competitive advantages that are recognized around the globe. These include the ability to work in metric, especially for U.S. clients and specialized skills derived from the “Canadian identity,” with its many attributes such as multiculturalism and multilingualism. This is in addition to the widely recognized capabilities of Canadian firms in ecologically responsible design and in design for extreme climatic conditions.

Canadian design has developed an international reputation for being competitive with the world's best; some areas of Canadian expertise, by subsector, are:

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN - furniture and fixtures, medical and communications equipment, transportation design including mass transit systems, aircraft and snowmobiles, electronics and other consumer products;

COMMUNICATION DESIGN - multilingual communications, corporate identity
programs, consumer branded and point-of-sale packaging design, graphic and wayfinding systems, public communications and electronic interface design (e.g. Internet sites);

INTERIOR DESIGN - retail outlets and office design, schools, hospitals and residences; design for multi-use facilities (e.g. malls, resorts and other tourist facilities);

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE - commercial, industrial and residential planning and landscape design, golf courses, public and theme parks, and campuses; and,

MULTIDISCIPLINARY EXPERTISE - institutional design and international theme events, i.e., Expositions (encompasses all four design disciplines).

Total employment is estimated at 44,000 designers working in approximately 5,700 Canadian design firms. The approximate division by discipline is 1,200 firms in interior design, 360 in industrial design, 3,600 communication design firms and 540 in landscape architecture.