Conclusion

Kinds of design

Design is trumpeted as the solution to a number of not only industrial but also individual and societal issues. Designers have been described by Laura Antonelli, the design curator at MoMa as the intellectuals of the 21st century – nothing less.(Gary Huswit, Objectified, 2009) There have been many pressures on the profession and on the idea of design itself, which for many years now has moved out of the sphere of marketing and object improvement, to invest a wider context of processes and institutions. But a tension can be found in this discourse. It is as if we were always looking for something design hasn’t yet done and should do; it is as if design could only nourish its endeavor through an endless manifesto attitude. As if we always were in a situation of great expectations. This is in clear tension with the fact that design is literally everywhere: it is diffuse. For a century now its productions have colonized public, private and mental spaces. Another way to point out the difficulty in defining design is to look at many labels of design. Process design, design thinking, emotional design, ergonomy, and the like would figure in a list, along with some other, more exotic variants. The fact that we contributed lables in our watch says one thing: design is everywhere, in many forms.

To organize our understanding of diffuse design, we have tried to introduce some catalyzers in our design watch. These are categories of design interventions, broadly construed, without attempting to link them but loosely to existing classifications. We talked about remediation design and exclusive design. We could have added other categories. Design for debate is design that draws your attention to some things you do not normally pay attention to, indicating that there is a political dimension to the contemporary understanding of the design activity. Strange design challenges (Emanuele Quiz, Strange Design) the boundaries between art and design. We can work on other catalyzers: sustainable design, low-tech design, evidence-based design, inclusion design, South-to-North design, situated design, time design, self-design, super-duper design (see next essay).

And, could there be a designless world?

Super-duper design

Let us say something about a category we just introduced: super-duper design. This is design that really would change things in a what that everybody may be absolutely happy with (except those who are unhappy with the idea that everybody could be happy with anything.) Happy in the sense that it would produce a real, substantive positive change in our lives and that there will no ethical or economic objection or to change. (A design that forces everyone to speak and read English is not going to satisfy this idea of making happy; a design that creates simultaneous translation from and to each language on the planet would not be economically viable; cases are easy to come by here.) Here is a couple of examples of super-duper design.

English orthography: replace ‘ph’ with ‘f’, use a single way to spell the sound ‘o’, have a single sound correspond to ‘ough’ (and not two, as in ‘though’ and ‘tough’), and so on.

Numerals in English: instead of ‘eleven’, use ‘one ten one’ (as in Chinese, and similarly to what English already does for ‘two-hundred-two’), get rid of irregular numerals (‘twenty’, ‘seventeen’, etc.)

The two changes will have considerable impact: a gain in written language acquisition that is measured in months if not years, and a gain in arithmetic acquisition, respectively. Will they happen? No. Actually, it is not accurate to say that they will make everybody happy. But can’t we at least get the conversation started?

Be it on the way we design a multiplication table or on how we display a text to maximize accessibility, on how we treat patents and monopolies or on digital tradeoffs, on urban landscaping or on how we protect kids from bumping their heads into corners, these conversations are relevant. If we see philosophy as negotiation of the complexity of the human experience we can imagine design as its phenotype. In a more and more interconnected, global society driven by technology, the need for conversations, even when they start as design errands, is real.