ILLUSTRATOR: A2/SW/HK + A2-TYPE
What is design? A tool to build a better world? A great
chair? A technical drawing? A profession? A means
of boosting profitability? A marketing ploy? Design
has fulfilled all of those roles, and many more. It is a
complex phenomenon that has meant many different
things at different times and in different contexts,
making it fiendishly difficult to define, especially
as it continues to acquire new meanings. Even its
etymology is problematic, as the design theorist
John Heskett illustrated with the phrase: ‘Design is
to design a design to produce a design.’ Nonsensical
though that sounds, it is grammatically correct.
Yet despite all of the muddles and clichés, for me,
design has always had one unwavering role. It is an
agent of change that can be used to interpret changes
of any type – whether they are personal, political,
cultural, social, economic, scientific, environmental,
or technological – to help to ensure that they will affect
us positively, rather than negatively. Design fulfilled
this function for the prehistoric communities that
turned caves into shelters, just as it does today by
identifying constructive uses for artificial intelligence,
quantum computing and other dauntingly powerful
technologies that have the potential to be both
immensely beneficial, and deeply damaging.
Not that interpreting technological advances is the
only challenge for contemporary design. At a timewhen we face tumultuous changes on many fronts,
we urgently need design to help us manage them.
Tackling the deepening environmental and refugee
crises. Fostering economic growth through innovation.
Quelling the rise of intolerance and extremism.
Reinventing dysfunctional areas of healthcare, social
services, education and the justice system. Enabling us
to express increasingly fluid personal identities. Design
is not a panacea, but if it is applied intelligently, it is a
powerful tool with which we can address these issues.
And yet design is often dismissed as slick and stylistic,
and as a reason why millions of tons of electronic
products are abandoned each year in toxic dumps,
rather than a means of cleaning them up. Such clichés
prevent us from realising its true potential, making it
very timely to brainstorm design now.
For centuries, design was deployed instinctively,
on the ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ principle
that prompted those prehistoric cave dwellers to build
shelters. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has been
applied knowingly and systematically, becoming
formalised and professionalised with the introduction
of specialist schools and methodologies amid a blizzard
of jargon. Industrialisation also categorised design as
a commercial discipline, generally executed under
instruction from clients. Some 20th-century designers
(including the pioneering environmentalists »Problem solved?
Design and ‘design thinking’ is increasingly seen as the secret sauce
for social and corporate advance. It’s a promise that has pulled a
dizzying list of head honchos and creative titans to our inaugural
Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore. Here, Alice Rawsthorn
looks at what design has done for us, and what it might yet doIntelligence
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