Design, the Future and the Human Spirit

Abstract

Introduction Designers, like everyone else on the planet, have good reason to be concerned about the future. The world is volatile, and the ability of the human race to make a healthy home for itself is at stake. Threats from global warming, poor nutrition, disease, terrorism, and nuclear weapons challenge the potential of everyone to exercise productive energies for the common good. Designers are certainly among those whose positive contributions are essential to the building of a more humane world. Trained in many disciplines—whether product design, architecture, engineering, visual communication, or software development—they are responsible for the artifacts, systems, and environments that make up the social world—bridges, buildings, the Internet, transportation, advertising, and clothing, to cite only a few examples. Companies would have nothing to manufacture without designers, nor would they have services to offer. Paradoxically, designers united as a professional class could be inordinately powerful and yet their voices in the various fora where social policies and plans are discussed and debated are rarely present. While the world has heard many calls for social change, few have come from designers themselves, in part because the design community has not produced its own arguments about what kinds of change it would like to see. Notwithstanding the discursive and practical potential to address this issue, the worldwide design community has yet to generate profession-wide visions of how its energies might be harnessed for social ends.1 As creators of models, prototypes, and propositions, designers occupy a dialectical space between the world that is and the world that could be. Informed by the past and the present, their activity is oriented towards the future. They operate in situations that call for interventions, and they have the unique ability to turn these interventions into material and immaterial forms. Granted that others usually define the conditions of their work, designers still create the artifacts that are put to use in the social world. At issue in any call for designers to act is the question of their autonomy or ability to set their own agendas. Initial support for this ability came from Tomas Maldonado and other design theorists in Italy beginning in the 1970s. They characterized the designer as one 1 There have been noble efforts such as the ICSID “Humane Village” Congress in Toronto in 1997, with inspiring words by the keynote speakers (Paul Hawken, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and others) but, in the end, the congress left only a modest legacy of ideas for building a constructive future.