Abstract: The research is devoted to the issue of changing the understanding of design and its current state. Although design originated in the West, today the East is beginning to play an increasingly important role in its development. As a product of modernist culture, design initially followed the principle of "form follows function", but after a "semantic turn" it began to be understood as meaning-making, and form followed meaning. However, today the understanding of meanings only through the prism of "language" has exhausted itself, the understanding today is that design not only intellectually generated meanings, but also senses–sensations, therefore Western design theorists and practitioners began to look for alternative ways of developing design, which turned out to be consonant with the path that is being followed in the East today. The purpose of the article is to summarize some of the results of the alternative "linguistic" understanding of design in the West and in the East. The subject of the study is the change in the ways of meaning formation in modern design. Research methods used in the article are:
- methods of synchronous and asynchronous analysis, that allowed us to analyze transformations in the understanding of design, both historical and regional;
- the method of generalization, including comparative analysis, allows to understand the difference in approaches to design and shaping in different regions. The article presents modern design as a multicultural process, where different regions contribute to the general "theory" of design. However, the current eastern way of design is heterogeneous. Here we can highlight the Japanese vision of design – the "meditative approach", which involves reflection of sensations, reliance on personal experience, as well as the Chinese vision of design that is just taking shape today. We see China's potential contribution to the development of design in the inclusion of "embodied mind" in the design process, when the correctness of the chosen solution is determined not only by speculative calculations, but "resonates" with the feelings of the designer and the customer, as well as in the concept of "living form", when not only compositional or functional connections between elements are seen, but also the coherence of their movements. The Chinese approach can be called "vitalizing".