Why Design matters
“Design is bullshit”
If I don’t hear it from straightforward friends, I can read it in the sceptical look of others when I say that I study sustainable design. Today I want to write about this awkward but meaningful moment when I try to explain why I think that DESIGN IS USEFUL.
Stereotypes
Most people understand design in its most famous and most attractive way: making beautiful and unique objects, like the DSW chair by the Eames couple for Vitra or Stark’s Juicy Salif lemon squeezer for Alessi. This is Edition Design, composed of elite and most mediatized designers, but yet representing only a very small proportion of Design’s various disciplines and accessible to relatively few users because of its high price. This first cliché of Design led to the use of the word “design” as an adjective in many languages (“wow, this lamp is so design!”) reducing the whole Design process into a biasing synonym of “sexy”… Maybe Design tries to make things more beautiful and therefore sellable, but it is not Marketing either. Marketing aims to identify the needs and wants of potential customers in order to spot business opportunities, while Design aims to identify needs and wants of potential users in order to create a more pleasant environment for them. Some will say that designers believe in a utopian world where drawings can save people… Actually, a good Design can save lives, as much as a bad one can kill. A most obvious example is the crash of a Boeing 737 in 1989 near Kegworth, England, partly due to an unintuitive and clumsy design of engines’ dials. Social designer Victor Papanek even said “industrial design has allowed production line killing. Designing criminally unsafe cars which kill or maim almost a million people worldwide every year, creating totally new types of indestructible trash which chaotically fills the landscape, selecting materials and manufacturing processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous species.” In this view, we need to redefine what is a good design, and how it can avoid these atrocities, in order to fulfill Design’s humanist mission.
Design’s mission
But a good design can, on the other hand, save lives, make people’s everyday life easier and happier, but also drive positive change and make the world healthier and more equal. Yes, political and economic legislations are already being made to drive that change. But regulations are more barriers than solutions, and need considerable time to get through the validation process. And yes, technological innovation is primordial to enable environmental sustainability. But it creates tools, not uses. Engineering already provides precious solutions, but to integrate them into the real world and into people’s habits, we need creativity and a user’s knowledge. And these are exactly the designer’s skills!
Allow change
So Design can be bullshit, but when it follows sustainable regulations and makes the best use of technologies, it creates powerful solutions that are grounded in people’s and environmental needs. Damning Design’s past and potentially future negative impacts is important, but only judging Design for its flaws would be wasting its powerful potential in driving positive societal change. And this potential is what now has to be acknowledged, promoted, developed and integrated. Not condemned.
(http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/ComAndRep/Kegworth/AAIB/COPY/a2f1.jpg)
(http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/ComAndRep/Kegworth/AAIB/COPY/a2f1.jpg)
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