makeshift

Design is a discipline with its head in the library and its hands in the cookie jar. When we talk about Design on TV, in books, or in film, we treat it as an art or a science, whose principles are platonic and founded in ergonomics, culture or knowledge. We give design much the same credit as we give to 'History', 'Sculpture' or 'Music' (or other 'subjects' you can learn in school and exhibit in galleries). But at the same time, we all know that design is a business.

When we think about design, we're normally thinking about designers, and when we're thinking about designers we're normally thinking about professional designers: people who design for money. The reality is probably even more stark than that: everything that we conventionally call design is actually design that can be paid for (and increasingly - design that pays).

THE INDUSTRY VIEW

In many ways it's actually an incredible contradiction, but we've come to accept it as normal. That acceptance seems to have slowly gravitated towards a particular view of design's role in society which, to a large extent, could only have survived as long as no one talked too much about ... well... design's role in society. Like so many things, that idea of design has now been absorbed as a subset of The Economy called 'the design industry' .... often associated with chic marketable products: 'designer' shoes, 'designer' vases, 'designer' houses. But that idea is changing.

Forced perhaps by the recession, perhaps by a growing sense of urgency over climate change (and the inadequacy of the 'green product design' narrative as a response to it), or perhaps simply by a collective wake-up to social need, there seems to be what ecological economist Tom Green describes as "a growing will to question fundamental assumptions". This obviously applies to economics - but also to design.

An encouraging recent example of this was the Today programme's interview with design critic Alice Rawsthorn on BBC Radio 4. Asked to commentate upon shifts in the design industry, she emphasised a change away frøm our traditional focus on material objects towards software design and what she very succinctly labelled as "social design", "process-design" and systems-thinking. It reinforced Bruce Mau's assertion:

"No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes"

These statements are incredibly refreshing, but (as the interviewer on Radio 4 exposed) they don't fit comfortably with the publicly-accepted Industry / Business view of design as we have hitherto understood it. What would be the point of buying a Phillipe Starck process? As if waking up halfway through the strangely-shaped vase / shoe / art gallery it was drawing and looking beyond its own wallet for the first time in decades, professional design needs a back-story that makes more sense to the conditions it finds itself confronted by. It suddenly needs to think more seriously, and more connectedly about what design is, and what it should be doing. All in a way that other disciplines and society at large can make sense of.

DARWIN'S EPILOGUE

In other words, while all species adapt to their environment over hundreds of thousands of years by means of genetic selection, humans actually have the ability firstly to adapt their environment to them (for example: shelter, arable farming, central heating, cloud-seeding...) and secondly to literally participate in their own evolution. Design is a means by which we are able to creatively modify ourselves in order to augment specific capabilities without waiting for natural selection.

So, for example: Tweezers modify our fingers to handle smaller things than they would otherwise could. A JCB does the opposite*. Bicycles improve our speed, wheelbarrows our maximum load. Whether consciously (through science) or unconsciously (by intuition) these leaps of man-made evolution mimic, in very obvious ways, characteristics which other species might have evolved naturally for certain environments: clothes in place of fur - a diving mask, aqualung and flippers in place of gills and webbed feet - or binoculars, sunglasses or night-vision goggles. Wetsuits are a skin-upgrade. Body armour in its various forms is a very obvious application of technology to improve our evolutionary chances - medieval armour even looked like a sort of artificial human exo-skeleton.

That ability to augment our own abilities also allows us to mitigate (or even annul) the effects of our disabilities, whether they are natural or unnatural (contact lenses, hearing aids, wheelchairs)

Other evolutionary upgrades are not so much about altering our relationship with the environment, but rather our interactions with one-another (for example wristwatches, high-heels, condoms).

This way of looking inevitably raises the question of how much technology is applied simply to mitigate risks or conditions created by other technology (Airbags, high-vis fabric, anti-virus software...)

As is often highlighted, the distinction between what we'd call our 'nature' and these technological interventions into our nature is becoming more and more fuzzy - merging through pharmaceuticals, bionics, stem-cell growth and, ultimately, genetic engineering itself.

THE GAP

But that model of design, even as a general idea, doesn't match up to what we can observe about the design industry, and that might be the point. Somewhere along the line we became much more focused on the objects themselves and much less focused on the outcomes those objects enabled - or indeed the processes that went into making them. It's not particularly hard or controversial to suggest why: the design industry was never created to attend to our evolutionary advantage. In fact it is a much more recent phenomenon than most of us assume. Professional design (as we know it) only emerged in the 20th century at the service of a consumer economy; in other words imagining things which could be marketed and sold, as opposed to what was needed or was in our best interest as a species.

As behavioral economists have observed, we unconsciously make choices which are 'against our best interest' all the time. Funnily enough, that also has something to do with those same frontal lobes of our brain which allow us to simulate the outcome of our actions - but getting it wrong. So we make choices that overestimate the difference that a decision will make ('will buying that pair of high-status jeans really get me laid?'), and we make choices that underestimate the difference a decision will make (this burger will nourish me - and the 'happy'-meal toy that comes with it is harmless). The design industry only needed to make money in order to exist , it didn't need to make us evolutionarily any better off either individually or collectively. As long as it sold, it was good design, and advertising played an equivalent, or possibly greater part in determining what sold than design did. So we designers now find ourselves hooked on designing 'products' rather than evolutionary adaptions, and often in doing so using up resources and creating ecological and social inequalities which on the long run are actually working against human evolution.

THE GAP

Collectively, these are the outward noises of a generation of designers waking up and trying to shift the paradigm of design professionalism away frøm the marginal "priesthood" of "aesthetics, image and fashion" towards a more engaged view of design which can offer insights into the complexities of how we foster resources and time; how we interact, analyse, learn, and participate in the economy not by increasing consumption but by redesigning it. It's not a revolution - and the critique is anything but new - but it's happening now. Probably for no better reason than... it has to... or we're really screwed.

* Credit: Brian Duffy of Modified Toy Orchestra