Through sharing results of an analysis of design language use in several writing studies journals, this article explores why we invoke design in published scholarship. After defining the approach to composing known as design thinking, it then moves to a comparison of design thinking and the writing process and looks at an example application of design thinking in the field. I argue that design thinking not only offers a useful approach for tackling multimodal/multimedia composing tasks, but also situates the goal of writing studies as textual action and asks us to reconsider writing's home in the university.