NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Special Issue, April 2007
Michelle Siegel |
Beautiful Diversion
UNICEF, United States
The article covers many points; the one that emerges as most important is the potential that the design profession holds for sustainability. Those who are blessed with creative jobs, such as designers, can find opportunity in sustainability. This call to action is a positive message. However, the author’s use of language is unnecessarily insulting, in the aggressive style of Fox News. He is attempting to be provocative, but it distracts the reader from the message. The author’s topics are paraphrased in italics below. “Designing for instead of designing with?” When clients purchase design services, they expect quality. They want designers that have a good reputation and a proven record of accomplishment. Designers deserve acknowledgement for their unique visions. That does not preclude them from working in a participatory way, since design by its very nature is participatory. If the designer does not take into account the client’s needs, they won’t be paid. Both clients and designers will have to change their mindsets in purchasing and providing design services in order to develop a more participatory process. Advocates for the design profession and design managers should demonstrate that participation in design processes and methods could lead a client to find opportunity. “Designers design crap that hurts the planet.” Designers have a professional context. Don’t remove the design profession from the economic system in which it exists. Capitalism is our dominant economic model, and it is dependant upon industrial production to create goods and services out of resources. As a consequence of developing knowledge, social, political and economic priorities change. Designers respond to social and economic pressures of the day. “The paradigm for design is sustainability.” I’m a graduate of Pratt’s design management program, in which sustainability was the heart of its curriculum. Design is about creating good and services, and design management is about taking the goals of the organization, including competitive factors into perspective when producing design. Managing design for sustainability results will keep a company relevant in the coming era. “The mink coat is sustainable.” I assume the author states that a mink coat can be sustainable because it is biodegradable. Mink coats are products of systematic industrial farming. Large-scale production of most things we consume is based upon industrialized farming. As developing countries systematize for capitalism they consume their natural resources, like Uganda, for instance, which has approved a plan to cut down a forest reserve for a sugar cane plantation. We need better definitions of sustainability, and to be clear whether we are referring to environmental or economic sustainability. If we use design in the widest sense of the word it is not the exclusive domain of designers. Everyone should be responsible for sustainability. We have to analyze, rethink and redesign industrial systems. I think that the most productive advances for designers will come from the development of new materials by chemical engineers across industries.
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