Unlike many design disciplines, web design goes through cyclical discussions about how to define itself and what it does – anyone who’s ever spent any time in the UX community will know about this.

I was prompted to write about this from reading Lyza’s column on A List Apart, and Jeffrey’s follow-up post this weekend.

In 2010, I attended An Event Apart in Seattle. During that show, I saw three or four presentations – from Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy, and of course, Ethan. All of them, independently, talked about how using media queries and CSS we could change the content using a fluid layout. It was a perfect storm, and indicative of the thinking that led Ethan to write – and A Book Apart to publish – Responsive Web Design a year later. The rest, they say, is history.

Responsive Web Design had a simple formula: fluid grids, media queries and flexible images. Put them all together, and your web product will be responsive. As Jeffrey said:

If Ethan hadn’t included three simple executional requirements as part of his definition, the concept might have quickly fallen by the wayside, as previous insights into the fluid nature of the web have done. The simplicity, elegance, and completeness of the package—here’s why, and here’s how—sold the idea to thousands of designers and developers, whose work and advocacy in turn sold it to hundreds of thousands more. This wouldn’t have happened if Ethan had promoted a more amorphous notion. Our world wouldn’t have changed overnight if developers had had too much to think about. Cutting to the heart of things and keeping it simple was as powerful a creative act on Ethan’s part as the “discovery” of #RWD itself.

The idea of responsive design has taken a few years to go from cubicle to board room. But now it is a project requirement coming directly from there. For the past eighteen months, at Mark Boulton Design, we’ve seen it as a requirement on RFPs. And with that, it brings a whole other set of problems. Because what does it mean? Hence, we have to Define The Damn Thing all over again. And recently, to be honest with you, I’ve stopped doing it. Because, depending on who you speak to, responsive web design has come to mean everything and nothing.

There are some who see it as media queries, fluid grids and scalable images. There are those who see it as adaptive content, or smarter queries to the server to make better use of bandwidth available. There are those who just see it as web design.

Me? I think it’s just like Web 2.0. And AJAX. It’s just like Web Standards (although to a lesser extent) and exactly like HTML5 (in the minds of those of you who aren’t developers) and its rather splendid branding. Responsive design has grown into a term that represents change above all else. To me, responsive design is more about a change in the browser and device landscape. A change in how people consume content. A change in how we make things for the web. And responsive design is just the term to encapsulate that change in a nice, easy solution that can get sold to a board of directors worrying about their profit and loss.

‘Responsive design is forward-thinking and means it will work on a phone, and that’s where things are headed’.

We’ve heard this line time and time again over the past couple of years. You see, responsive design is a useful term and one that will stick around for a while whilst we’re going through this change. How else do we describe it, otherwise? Web design? I don’t think so. No board member is going to get behind that; it’s not new enough.