It always strikes me as odd that as powerful a force as design should so often be misunderstood and trivialized. Design determines the quality of so many aspects of our lives, and as we cannot avoid its influence, the more fully we understand it, the likelier we are to be able to turn it to our advantage.
The more I have learnt about design, the more intrigued I have become, particularly in the eight years that I had the pleasure of writing a weekly column about design for the International Herald Tribune. Many of the themes I discussed there are addressed in this book, but in greater depth than a newspaper column allows.
Anyone who writes about design has to explain what they mean by it. In Hello World, as in the International Herald Tribune, I have interpreted it as broadly as possible, not only as a professional discipline, but also as an intuitive process that existed long before there was a word to describe it. This book addresses design’s role in planning third-century BC military campaigns and helping eighteenth-century pirates to terrorize their victims into speedy surrender, as well as in developing new objects, information systems, and smarter ways of dealing with data deluge and recycling trash. Although architecture is an important area of design, it is addressed only fleetingly because it operates on such a different scale to other fields that I felt it might be distorting to include it.
Discovering the power and nuances of design has given me great happiness over the years. I hope that reading Hello World will help others to share my enjoyment.