Introduction

This is a collection of writings about design, most of which were published between 2005 and 2013 in Morf, a 6-monthly magazine for design students in the Netherlands. Reading them back, I guess a common thread is my frustration with the fact that 19th-century preoccupations still have a great influence on the present-day philosophy of design. Yes, I’m talking about you, modernism!

Most design schools still propagate the basic tenets of modernism, apparently unaware of the havoc they wreak. Postmodernism was a strong response, but after a wild period of deconstructivistic fun, we seem to have reverted back to the ‘good old’ technocrat paradigm of modernism without giving it too much thought. Postmodernism asked a lot of questions, but it didn’t give any answers, or rather, it gave too many.

In “Design as Natural Phenomenon”, I addressed this problem, and proposed to build a new philosophy of design on a different footing. “A Note on Design and Tradition” (written after taking part in a seminar for design students) gives an example of the aforementioned havoc. Designers attracted by traditional methods of production should be aware of the precariousness of their position.

There are designers who see their profession matter-of-factly as a way to earn money and don’t think too deeply about the way design influences our culture, or is influenced by it. And then there are designers who want to change the world. Frankly, I have no idea which group is the majority, but without a doubt the second group is the most vocal.

Personally, I want to change the world too. The negative impacts of the presence of humanity on our planet need to be addressed, as emphasized in: “Some Unscientific Noteson Design” (a lecture for the Technical University of Bandung).

I therefore fully support any designer who is driven by idealism, but to change the world with design is not as straightforward as many designers tend to believe. Design primarily deals with the appearance of things, and hence, it runs the risk of always treating symptoms and never the disease.

I addressed this issue in “Reality Check”, written from the perspective of a developing country, and also in “You Will Find the World Responding to Your Sincere Initiative”, which is about a new brand of idealism.

Meanwhile, it’s not as if the world doesn’t change anyway. Part of the problem is too much change, too fast. Design is always somehow involved with the future. A design is a plan, after all. Designers are quite sensitive to the direction in which things are moving, but their perspective is usually limited to trends and the near-future.

In times of severe and exciting change it’s difficult to make sense of the situation we find ourselves in, because we tend to evaluate it on the basis of the values of the preceding era. Obviously, it’s better to be prepared for the future, but successfully predicting it is not so easy. Somehow we never see the most important changes coming. Quantitative predictions are fairly reliable, but qualitative impacts are fundamentally unpredictable.

This hasn’t stopped me from writing “Design in the Era of Chaos”, about the way young people respond to the present new circumstances, and “The Future is Digital”, about the process of digitization, which we haven’t seen the end of quite yet.

May, 2013