1 What is design?
Designing is not a profession but an attitude.
— László Moholy-Nagy1
When it came to waging war, outwitting enemies, crushing dissent and terrorizing foes, Ying Zheng had all the necessary skills. He may not have been quite as bloodthirsty and remorseless a tyrant as his harsher critics have claimed, but he was exceptionally cunning, determined and resourceful. And these qualities proved invaluable in his efforts to transform the obscure kingdom of Qin into one of the most powerful and enduring empires in history: China.
Ying Zheng was in his early teens when he became king of Qin in 246 BC.2 It took nearly ten years for him to foil his political rivals and assert his full authority over the realm. A decade and a half later, he had conquered all of Qin’s wealthier, seemingly more powerful neighbours. The military coups began when his forces attacked and defeated the weakest of the neighbouring states. Another conquest was made by pretending to flee, and ambushing the opposing army when it pursued them. A third state surrendered after Ying Zheng’s troops flooded its capital city by diverting the Yellow River. In the final battle, the ruler of Qin admitted defeat after Ying Zheng’s forces staged a surprise attack on his capital, arriving there before its defences were prepared.
Ruthlessness, military might, tactical prowess and diplomatic guile served Ying Zheng well, as did an expertly managed espionage network of informants, a redoubtable arsenal of weapons and a rigorously trained army of archers, swordsmen, charioteers and cavalrymen. But he had another asset at his disposal, one that is often overlooked by military historians but has proved indispensable to ambitious warlords throughout history: an unusually sophisticated understanding of design.
There were many decisive elements in Ying Zheng’s military triumphs, but an important one was the design of his troops’ weapons. When he embarked on his career as a warlord, an army’s fortunes were determined by the combined might of hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, mostly peasants who had been conscripted, often against their will. Training these ingénu soldiers and ensuring that they could use their weapons efficiently was essential to the success of any military campaign.
The design of all weaponry was improved under Ying Zheng’s command. The optimum size, shape, choice of material and method of production for each piece was determined, and every effort made to ensure that weapons of the same type adhered to the chosen formula. The Qin army had used bronze spears for over a thousand years, but the blades were rendered shorter and broader. The dagger-axes were redesigned too. Putting six holes in the blades, rather than four, ensured that their bronze heads could be attached more securely and were less likely to shake loose in the frenzy of battle.
Even more important were the changes to Qin’s bows and arrows. Archers were critical in determining the outcome of every stage of combat in Ying Zheng’s era, but their weapons were made by hand, often to different specifications. If an archer ran out of arrows during a battle, it was generally impossible for him to fire another warrior’s arrows from his bow. Similarly, if he was killed or injured, his remaining ammunition would be useless to his comrades. And if a bow broke, that archer’s arrows risked being wasted. The same problems applied to more complex weapons like crossbows. The result was that an army’s progress was often impeded by weapons failure because its archers were unable to fight at full efficiency, if at all.
Ying Zheng’s forces resolved these problems by standardizing the design of their bows and arrows. The shaft of each arrow had to be a precise length, and the head to be formed in a triangular prism, always of the same size and shape. The components of longbows and crossbows were made identical too, and these design formulas were rigidly enforced. Each piece of government equipment was branded with a distinctive mark to identify who had made it and in which workshop. If a particular weapon was deemed substandard, the offending artisans would be fined, and punished more severely should the problem recur. To foster a sense of collective responsibility for the workshop’s output, all their co-workers and supervisors were punished too.3 Unsurprisingly, the efficacy of Ying Zheng’s arsenal increased significantly, with disastrous consequences for his less resourceful foes. Centuries later, there are echoes of the rigour with which he and his henchmen improved the design of their weapons in the design studios of companies like Apple and Samsung, where teams of designers strive to find cheaper and more effective ways of producing new digital devices that are lighter, sleeker, faster and more versatile than their predecessors.
Having established his empire and renamed himself Qin Shihuangdi, or ‘First Emperor of China’, in 221 BC, he imposed his authority on other aspects of his subjects’ lives. A unified system of coinage was introduced, as were standardized weights and measures, a universal legal code and common method of writing.4 These changes made daily life more orderly, and boosted the economy by making it easier for people from different regions to trade. They also had a symbolic importance in helping to persuade the new emperor’s subjects, many of whom had fought against his army in battle, or had family or friends who had died doing so, that they had a personal stake in his immense domain. Take the new coins. Every time a farmer or a carpenter used them, they saw a tangible reminder that they themselves were part of a dynamic new empire, and had good reason to feel grateful to its visionary founder and ruler.
To reinforce the new national identity, Qin Shihuangdi forced the wealthiest and most powerful of his subjects to leave their ancestral homes, thereby severing their ties to the local communities, and to settle in Qin’s capital, Xianyang. Hundreds of palaces were constructed there, including sumptuous ones for the emperor himself, which were positioned to align with the stars in an allusion to his role as the ruler, not only of China, but the rest of the universe too.5 Such trappings have been the default means with which egomaniacal rulers have flaunted their power throughout history, hoping to dazzle and intimidate their subjects, but Qin Shihuangdi’s were especially magnificent. He also made sure that the inhabitants of even the most remote regions knew of his power and achievements by ordering descriptions of his feats to be carved into mountains across China.
Here, Qin Shihuangdi demonstrated his command of design strategy, by applying what we now call design thinking to identify what he needed to do to secure the future of his regime, and to communicate the results to his subjects. There are parallels between his strategic use of design and its role in successful corporate identity programmes, such as Nike’s, and communication exercises like Barack Obama’s presidential election campaigns. Yet the first emperor of China also applied design as a medium of self-expression, and it is for this that he is most famous.
Like his immediate ancestors, Qin Shihuangdi believed that the living and the dead belonged to the same community, and regarded death with dread, as an attack on the individual by evil spirits. He tried desperately to avoid it, dispatching expeditions into the seas east of China in doomed attempts to find the mythical islands of Penglai, Yingzhou and Fangzhang, whose herbs and plants were thought to have the power to grant everlasting life. When the expeditions failed, the emperor decided to ensure that, if he had to die, he would, at least, enjoy a spectacularly self-indulgent afterlife. All his ancestors had built lavish tombs, but Qin Shihuangdi was determined that his resting place would be even more magnificent, reflecting his greater power and status. He ordered the construction of an imposing burial chamber in a vast underground palace covering an area of over twenty square miles on the slopes of Mount Li, near what is now the Lintong area of China, where a group of local farmers discovered its remains by chance in 1974, while drilling for water.6
Like his forebears, Qin Shihuangdi would have insisted that the same courtiers, servants, warriors and entertainers who had served him during his life should continue to care for him in death. Some members of his retinue would have been expected to die with him, like his favourite pets and horses and the finest animals in his menageries, but most of his posthumous entourage were replicas of the originals made from bronze, wood or terracotta. Many of them were intended to entertain the dead emperor, but he was particularly anxious to guarantee his personal safety in the afterlife, fearful that the victims of his warmongering would attempt to wreak revenge upon him in death. One set of pits to the west of his burial chamber contained a cavalry of elaborately crafted bronze horses and chariots, each of which was half life-size and made from over two tonnes of bronze, embellished with gold and silver ornaments. To the east of the chamber were three pits whose contents have made his tomb one of the most famous archaeological sites in history: the ‘Terracotta Army’ of seven thousand life-sized warriors who were to guard the dead emperor, armed with real swords, daggers, crossbows and axes.
Hundreds of thousands of workers were transported to Mount Li to construct the imperial tomb and its contents. A dedicated team of over a thousand labourers toiled on the terracotta warriors, whose production demanded an even more sophisticated system of standardized design than Qin’s military arsenal had done. Each figure was made to particular specifications by coiling, rolling and moulding the terracotta, and applying the decorative details by hand. The work was so arduous, and took so long, that many of the workers died on site and were buried there.7
Just as Qin Shihuangdi had deployed design with extreme efficiency to amass wealth and power during his life, he used it to secure what he believed would be an equally resplendent death, by creating the afterlife of his fantasies, which served a practical purpose too. Building such an outlandishly extravagant burial site was so eloquent a testimony of his might that it reinforced it as effectively as his celestially planned palaces, mountain inscriptions and the new imperial currency. But it was also a physical manifestation of the inner world of his imagination, a material expression of how China’s first emperor saw himself, and wished to define his place in history, which presaged contemporary design spectacles such as Olympic Games opening ceremonies, the Arirang Festivals in North Korea and the elaborate sets of Chanel’s haute couture shows at the Grand Palais in Paris.
What would design have meant to Qin Shihuangdi and his subjects in the third century BC? Probably nothing, at least in its contemporary sense. The word ‘design’ dates back to ancient Rome and the Latin verb designare, which had several meanings, including to mark, trace, describe, plan and perpetrate. But it is highly unlikely that Qin Shihuangdi would have been congratulated on his design prowess, even though he deployed different interpretations of the sequence of thought and actions, which we now describe as design, with exceptional rigour and ingenuity. And at every stage of his career, first as a preternaturally ambitious young warlord, and then as one of the richest, most powerful rulers in history, design played a decisive role in his success. Yet unlike latter-day design tacticians such as Apple, Chanel, Nike, Barack Obama’s campaign advisors and the despotic Kim dynasty, Qin Shihuangdi conceived and executed his design feats entirely instinctively.
So did everyone else who, equally unconsciously, engaged with design long before and after his reign. As the American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss wrote in his 1955 book Designing for People: ‘Somewhere in the deep shadowy past, primitive man, desiring water instinctively dipped his cupped hands into a pool and drank. Some of the water leaked through his fingers. In time he furnished a bowl from soft clay, let it harden and drank from it, attached a handle and made a cup, pinched the rim at one point, creating a pitcher.’8 When Dreyfuss’s thirsty caveman set about transforming that bowl into a cup, and then a jug, he acted on intuition, because he needed to find a way of drinking without wasting water, just as the young Ying Zheng recognized the need to make deadlier weapons. Whenever medieval carpenters or blacksmiths took it upon themselves to do more than copy an existing object, maybe by making something less fragile or more elegant, they too were acting as de facto designers, as were all the sailors who have ever tinkered with the rigging of their ships, or farmers with their tools and the walls they have built to protect their land.
The first definition of ‘design’ in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1548, when it appeared as a verb meaning to ‘indicate’ or ‘designate’. Other interpretations soon emerged. In 1588, it was used as a noun meaning ‘purpose, aim, intention’. Five years later, it had assumed a more elaborate role as: ‘a plan or scheme conceived in the mind of something to be done, the preliminary conception of an idea that is to be carried into effect by action’.9 These early meanings have survived, and new ones have appeared over the years, some of them generic, and others defining the word more precisely.
Every word with a long history is redefined over time, reflecting anything from the prevailing attitudes of particular eras and commercial opportunism to unexpected catastrophes, but few words have ended up being as ambiguous as ‘design’. The more meanings it has acquired, the slipperier and more elusive it has become, not least because so many of its newer interpretations sit oddly with older ones. The design historian John Heskett has compared the difficulty, if not impossibility, of defining ‘design’ to doing the same for ‘love’.10 Both words have so many layers of meaning that they can be read very differently in different contexts. Just as ‘love’ can describe anything from tender affection and lifelong devotion to unbridled lust and destructive obsession, it is possible for ‘design’ to convey a minute technical detail to one person; a million-dollar chair to another; or a life-changing innovation, such as an efficient, inexpensive prosthetic limb, to a third. As for the members of the neo-creationist movement, who believe that parts of the universe were created, not by the organic process of evolution described by Charles Darwin, but by a rational system orchestrated by an ‘intelligent designer’, to them design is an explanation for the origins of life.11
For as long as there is no clear consensus on what design represents, it will be prey to more muddles and clichés. The seeds of the problem lie in the sixteenth century, when it ceased to be a purely generic word and was adopted as a specific term by architects, engineers, shipbuilders and artisans to describe the drawings, plans or diagrams which indicated in detail how their work should be built. When Giorgio Vasari visited Leonardo da Vinci’s studio in Florence to research his 1550 book Lives of the Artists, he recorded seeing his ‘designs for mills, fulling machines and engines’, as well as ‘a splendid engraving of one of these fine and intricate designs with the words in the centre: Leonardus Vinci Academia’.12
Ancient design ingenuity, the stones of Hagar Qim Temple in Malta
A limestone wall on Inis Meáin in Galway Bay, Ireland
A drystone wall in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
A drystone wall on the Shetland Islands, Scotland
The objective of such ‘designs’ was to provide guidance for the craftsmen who would fabricate their contents, with the aim of ensuring that the end result was as the architect or designer had envisaged. This role seems clear enough, but design was soon also used to describe the thought process behind the development of the ideas represented in those ‘designs’, as well as their outcome. John Heskett summed up this etymological tangle with the sentence: ‘Design is to design a design to produce a design.’13 Silly though it sounds, that phrase is grammatically correct, and factually accurate when used in the right context. And as if that was not confusing enough, the technical definition of ‘design’ was to be redefined again in the industrial era.
By the early seventeenth century, a delegated system of design and production akin to the one used by Leonardo and his peers was adopted by the porcelain makers in the Jingdezhen area of China, who had established a thriving trade in exporting oriental porcelain to Europe.14 Decades later, a similar process was introduced to the royal manufactories founded in France by Louis XIV, the roi du soleil or ‘Sun King’, to produce exquisitely crafted furnishings for his palaces. The most famous of them was Gobelins, the Parisian tapestry and cabinetmakers, where the artist Charles Le Brun cast himself in the unofficial role of chief designer.15
A personal favourite of both Louis and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his powerful finance minister, Le Brun eventually became a director of Gobelins and saw his work there as a way of extending his aesthetic influence over the royal court. Hundreds of craftsmen were employed in Gobelins’s workshops, where they translated detailed drawings and models provided by Le Brun and other artists into finished products. To the king and Colbert, the magnificent workmanship of the manufactories formed part of their strategy of convincing the French people that Louis XIV was the world’s greatest living monarch and a figure of inestimable historic importance: exactly the same impression that Qin Shihuangdi had sought to make on his subjects centuries before. The awe-inspiring effect of Louis’s furniture was reinforced by the splendour of his palaces, gardens, horses, weaponry, wardrobe, the statues of him erected throughout France, and every other visual manifestation of himself and his reign.16
Impressive though the king and Colbert were in their strategic use of design, its practical role in their manufactories proved to be more influential. When the Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s, the Gobelins system was implemented on a larger scale by newly opened factories, which needed to find efficient ways of manufacturing their goods to the same specifications at consistent quality in huge quantities, just as Qin’s military arsenal had done. In the forefront was the British industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, who personally supervised the development of the products made in his Staffordshire potteries.17 His success prompted other manufacturers to copy his methods, which became a template for what we now recognize as the industrial design process.
Industrialization defined design for the modern age by categorizing it into different disciplines and job descriptions, as well as by spawning a cottage industry of design strategists and consultants. By classifying design, it created the illusion of clarity, yet design is no less confusing in its industrial context than in any other. How can its use in the development of something as huge and as mechanically complex as a train compare to that of a Wedgwood vase? It cannot. Nor can it be compared to the design of the other components of rail travel: the tracks, bridges, tunnels, stations, signs, maps, timetables, tickets, signal boxes, signalling systems, the railway company’s visual identity, staff uniforms and so on. Or to other fields, like health, education, warfare, fashion, leisure, urbanism, flight, cars, computing and space exploration. And consider the very different dynamics of the working practices of various design disciplines: from an haute couture fashion designer, whose tools may be paper, a pencil, pins, scissors, fabric and trimmings; to the inscrutably complex supercomputers and wind tunnel tests in the laboratorial workspaces of aerospace design teams.
Precisely what design means and how it is applied has differed from company to company, industry to industry, country to country and era to era, depending on the scale of the project, its technical complexity, legislative constraints, political sensitivities, and random factors such as whether the engineers tend to shout louder than the designers in meetings. What is referred to as ‘design’ in one situation may be called ‘styling’ in another, or ‘engineering’, ‘programming’, ‘art direction’ or ‘corporate strategy’. And outside the commercial sphere, any intuitive design exercise is often ascribed to resourcefulness or common sense. Not that this should be surprising. Design’s versatility and its ability to adapt to so many different contexts are among its greatest strengths. But the lack of coherence in its industrial role has fostered more misunderstandings.
One is to relegate design to the role of styling or decoration. Few things infuriate designers more, and ‘style’ has become a dirty word for design purists, yet when the word ‘design’ features in the media or advertising campaigns, it is often synonymous with style. To some degree this is inevitable, not least because styling is the area of design on which people tend to feel most confident about expressing an opinion, especially as the logistics of the industrial design process can seem so complex and technologically intensive that it appears dauntingly opaque. Few of Josiah Wedgwood’s late eighteenth-century customers could have analysed the quality of the clay used to make a plate, but they would have known instinctively whether or not they warmed to its floral pattern and particular shade of blue – just as most of us feel more confident in saying whether we like the look of a new computer or digital device than analysing if its operating software is up to scratch, or if the manufacturer truly has done everything possible to ensure that its far-flung subcontractors are treating their employees fairly. Besides, styling is the one aspect of industrial design that no one else bothers to claim. Design can also contribute to corporate strategy, engineering, sustainability, communications, branding, production planning, sourcing and social responsibility, but so do other areas of the organization, such as the finance and marketing teams, which are often loath to share the credit.
Another misconception is to regard design solely as a commercial tool. In the early 1900s, the Constructivist movement hailed industrial design as a means of building a better world by producing ‘a new thing for the new life’ in post-revolutionary Russia.18 It was seen in the same heroic spirit by the modernist pioneers in the De Stijl group in the Netherlands and at the Bauhaus school in Germany. But by the second half of the twentieth century, design was generally consigned to a commercial role, not least because it played it so well: enriching entire economies as well as individual businesses. In post-war Italy, a new generation of industrialists joined forces with gifted young designers, most of whom had trained either as architects, like the Castiglioni brothers, Carlo Mollino and Ettore Sottsass, or as artists, in the case of Joe Colombo, Enzo Mari and Bruno Munari. Together, they produced such appealing and ingenious products that consumers were persuaded to pay extra for ‘the Italian line’.19 The seductive image of La Dolce Vita Italy sold millions of Fiat cars, Vespa scooters, espresso machines, Castiglioni lights for Flos, and Sottsass typewriters for Olivetti. As well as powering Italy’s post-war recovery, the ‘design adds value’ formula has been a template for expanding economies ever since, from Japan in the 1960s to China and South Korea today. As IBM’s former president Thomas J. Watson Jnr put it in a lecture he gave at the Wharton School of Business in 1973: ‘good design is good business’.20
Even the intellectual discourse on design often focused on its commercial guise. One of the most influential design commentators of the late twentieth century was the British cultural historian Reyner Banham, who produced a remarkable series of texts analysing its relationship to consumer culture and the fledgling pop movement.21 His take on design was reflected in the writing of the French philosophers Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, whose books unpacked the underlying meaning and symbolism of consumer products,22 as did the artists whose work proved most incisive in interrogating design, such as Sigmar Polke and Hans Haacke in Germany, Ed Ruscha in the United States, and Richard Hamilton in Britain.
There have always been alternative approaches to design, which have spurned its commercial applications, in favour of deploying it to improve our quality of life. In the same year that Watson Jnr delivered his Wharton lecture, a group of designers and programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set up the Visual Language Workshop (VLW), whose research has had an enormous influence on the digital images we now see on our phone and computer screens. Among them was Muriel Cooper, a graphic designer, then in her late forties, who was renowned for creating eloquent covers for books, including Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s 1972 postmodernist text, Learning from Las Vegas.23
Cooper discovered computers by chance in 1967, when she wandered into a class taught by her MIT colleague Nicholas Negroponte, and was flummoxed by the coded data she saw on the screen. ‘Didn’t make any goddamned sense to me,’ she recalled.24 Baffled though she was, the experience convinced her of the need for digital imagery to be as expressive and appealing as possible, like the best of printed graphics. At the time, computers were the preserve of programmers, like Ron MacNeil, with whom she co-founded the VLW. Helped by him, Cooper insisted on applying design solutions to what was then seen as a technology problem. A succession of gifted software designers studied under her at the VLW, where she worked until her death in 1994 with her black poodle, Suki, snoozing in her office. Among them was John Maeda, who recalled her habit of hoisting her feet up on to the desk as a tactical ploy whenever powerful men challenged her. ‘In Muriel’s era, men were tough, and she said: “I’ll be tougher.” So she showed them.’25
Watson Jnr’s lecture also coincided with the end of the ‘World Design Science Decade’ launched by another American design maverick, Richard Buckminster Fuller. Universally known as ‘Bucky’, he had championed environmentally responsible design since the 1920s, in famously long, often incomprehensible lectures, which also touched on his pet theories of universal patterns, the marvels of the tetrahedron and the nutritional value of Jell-O. One lecture ran for forty-two hours and was entitled ‘Everything I Know’.26 Bucky was so prolific that the New Yorker described him in a 1966 profile as ‘an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist and comprehensive designer’.27 Many people in those fields dismissed him as a dotty eccentric, and some of his most cherished schemes flopped, notably a floating city and flying car, but his emergency shelter – the geodesic dome – was among the twentieth century’s most successful examples of humanitarian design. Bucky’s formula for constructing a makeshift dome on any terrain, even in extreme weather, from scraps of wood, pieces of metal, old clothes or blankets, and whatever else is available, has provided sorely needed shelter for hundreds of thousands of people, often in desperate circumstances, all over the world. Producing ‘more for less’ was Bucky’s overriding objective,28 and the ‘World Science Decade’, which ran from 1965 to 1975, was intended to nurture a new generation of ‘comprehensive designers’ cast in his mould, who would dedicate their working lives to planning a fairer, more productive future for mankind.29
Neither Buckminster Fuller nor Muriel Cooper had squads of PR spinners to publicize their achievements, nor did the anonymous designers of the continuing stream of intuitive design coups, unlike all those who have stood to profit from reminding us of design’s commercial accomplishments. Design consultancies hoping to win new clients by proving how effective they have been for existing ones. Corporate executives whose best bet of clambering up the promotional ladder is to prove how lucrative their past design decisions have been. Politicians seizing the chance to make grandiose claims for economic regeneration policies. Business-school professors drumming up interest in design management courses. No wonder the media coverage of ‘design’ tends to focus on the nine ambulances and an emergency control vehicle that were called when irate shoppers came to blows over cut-price £45 sofas on the opening day of an IKEA furniture store in north London; or the raw eggs being pelted at the windows of an Apple store in Beijing by angry hordes of people, who had waited outside for hours to buy a new model of the iPhone on its first day on sale, only to be told that it would not open, because Apple feared for the safety of its staff and customers.30
Not that they are intended to, but such reports aggravate suspicions that design can be shifty, deceitful, manipulative and untrustworthy. As long ago as 1704, design was cast in a malevolent guise when it was described, according to the OED, as ‘a crafty contrivance’ or ‘a scheme formed to the detriment of another’. The dictionary’s first definition of a designer includes two very different interpretations of the role: ‘one who designs or plans’; and ‘in bad sense, a plotter, schemer, intriguer’.31 If you were told that I had ‘designs on you’, or on something that you valued, you would be justified in feeling alarmed. The use of the word ‘designer’ as an adjective has proved equally divisive. If an object is described as a ‘designer sofa’, ‘designer hotel’ or ‘designer shoe’, depending on your perspective, you would either expect it to be so enticing that you would cheerfully pay more for it than a less ostentatious version of the same thing, or you would darkly suspect it of being a rip-off.
Predictably, design has often ended up being misinterpreted or dismissed as a styling ruse. Unfair and clichéd though such stereotypes are, they have been remarkably effective in distorting perceptions of design by obscuring its constructive qualities. The danger is that by doing so, they may be preventing design from being given the chance to prove its worth in other areas of our lives. To draw a parallel with health care, if a hospital decided that its staff would treat physical problems, but not psychological issues, it would provide a sorely inadequate service and its patients would suffer unnecessarily. The same applies to design. If governments, businesses, banks, educationalists and NGOs think of it as only being useful for, say, producing fast cars and photogenic dresses, it risks being restricted to those roles, and is likely to be overlooked when it comes to tackling other challenges. Why would it occur to them that design might make a constructive contribution to the environmental and humanitarian causes championed by Buckminster Fuller, if it is only ever depicted as something that incites hysteria over sofas and phones?
Thankfully, that is changing. Firstly, a new generation of designers has rejected the constraints of commercial design and cast themselves as contemporary incarnations of Bucky’s ‘comprehensive designers’. Sustainability is high on the agenda, as are humanitarian challenges, such as economic development and improving social services. Take Nathaniel Corum, an American designer who started out in commercial design but wearied of ‘shopping for gold-plated fixtures’, and has since divided his time between running the education programme of the volunteer network Architecture for Humanity, helping to plan its post-earthquake reconstruction effort in Haiti, and building sustainable, off-grid homes for Navajo elders in New Mexico and Arizona. His commitment to humanitarian causes was inspired by his experience as a student working with Berber communities in Morocco, and tribal groups in Montana and North Dakota. Using AfH’s office in San Francisco as his base, Corum leads a nomadic life equipped with a military standard computer, which is shockproof, waterproof and so crushproof that it would still work if a car was driven over it.32 Similarly, the British social scientist Hilary Cottam worked on urban poverty projects for the World Bank in Africa, before founding the social design group Participle, which is committed to ‘addressing the big social issues of our time’. Participle forms teams of designers and other specialists to work with local and national government to plan and deliver more efficient ways of dealing with acute social problems, such as ageing, poverty, crime and intolerance.33
Critically, designers like those working for Participle have been given the chance to tackle such endeavours. Partly because the social, ecological, political and economic challenges confronting us are now so grave,34 and partly because many of the conventional methods of dealing with them have become decreasingly effective, there has been a growing willingness to experiment with new approaches, including design, not least as there has been a fundamental change in design practice.
Traditionally, design was valued chiefly for the things it produced, whether they were tangible, such as objects, spaces and images, or intangible like software. The design process is now deemed to have a value of its own and is increasingly applied to strategic and organizational issues in the form of what is called ‘design thinking’. Coined in 1991 by the American design engineer David Kelley, design thinking refers to the skills that designers develop, often without realizing, in analysing problems, using lateral thinking to identify smart solutions, and persuading other people to embrace the outcome.35 Qin Shihuangdi deployed a process very much like design thinking to assert his authority over his new subjects and to imbue them with a sense of national identity, as did Josiah Wedgwood when planning the expansion of his ceramics business. It is tempting to interpret the vision and confidence that Wedgwood displayed in making gutsy investment decisions – such as building a network of canals to transport his fragile wares by water, rather than packing them into horse-drawn carriages on bumpy eighteenth-century lanes36 – to the intuitive design skills he nurtured when developing new products for his potteries.
By liberating the design process from its traditional outcome, design thinking has enabled designers to apply their innate strengths to a wider range of challenges. It has been deployed as a commercial tool by companies like IDEO, which was co-founded by Kelley in 1991 in Palo Alto, California, originally to develop technology products for nearby Silicon Valley companies, and now advises banks on how to devise new types of accounts, and health-care groups on improving patient care.37 Design thinking has also proved indispensable in the public realm, not only to Participle, which uses it in all of its social design projects, but to the graphic designer Peter Saville, in his strategic role for the city of Manchester. Having made his name in the 1980s by designing record sleeves for bands like Joy Division and New Order, Saville has advised the city council on a range of issues, such as proposed property developments and the biennial cultural event the Manchester International Festival, often using the same thought processes with which he once devised Joy Division’s artwork.38
What does this mean in practice? Consider one urgent issue: the need to replace a dysfunctional road transport system with a safer, cheaper, cleaner, less stressful alternative. The conventional design solution would be to develop new forms of energy-efficient vehicles, which may very well help to alleviate the environmental damage, but would not solve all of the problems. That will require more radical changes in the design of the roads themselves and every other aspect of traffic management. Encouraging people to share journeys would be one option, as would coaxing them into cycling rather than driving, and trying to spread the flow of traffic through the day, possibly by introducing dynamic pricing for fuel, road tolls and parking spaces. Up until recently, a designer’s role in such endeavours would have been restricted to producing leaflets or websites explaining what courses of action economists, politicians, social scientists, psychologists, statisticians and corporate strategists had decided to take, but in future, they could influence decision making, as Participle and Peter Saville have done.
It would be foolish to overstate design thinking’s potential, but it has already proved its worth and, if it continues to do so, may be deployed increasingly as an alternative to conventional approaches to design. By removing the technical aspects of the design process, it has also made it easier for people from other fields to participate in design exercises, and for designers to contribute to theirs. And by opening up the design process, design thinking has reasserted the instinctive qualities of resourcefulness and ingenuity that characterized design in the pre-industrial age.
One of the most influential architecture exhibitions of the 1960s was ‘Architecture Without Architects’, which opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1964. Curated by the historian Bernard Rudofsky, it explored the design of buildings by people outside the architectural profession, including sled houses and cliff dwellings.39 The Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei addressed a parallel phenomenon in ‘Un-Named Design’, an exhibition at the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale in South Korea, which featured design projects executed by scientists, hackers, farmers and activists, but not professional designers. Among them was the programming code for a computer virus, a bucket made from a basketball by a Chinese farmer, a metal cage converted into a shelter by a homeless man in Hong Kong, a prosthetic leg, and a plan of action for a political protest in Cairo during the Arab Spring.40
With the possible exception of the prosthesis, none of those projects would conventionally have been considered to have been ‘designed’, yet elements of the design process are recognizable in the development of each one. Heartening though it is to celebrate the farmer’s ingenuity in reinventing the basketball, and the strategic flair required to plan the Cairo protest, ‘Un-Named’ begs the question of whether there is anything to be gained from identifying such initiatives as ‘design’. After all, there is a fine line between design and common sense, and just about any activity which involves originality and forethought can, in theory, be described as design. Surely the only justification for doing so is if it would improve the outcome?
Arguably, it might. Had the anonymous designers in ‘Un-Named’ been aware that there was a design dimension to their work, would they have devoted more time and energy to it? Possibly by planning more rigorously? Or by pushing themselves harder to think of unexpectedly apt solutions? The most important contributions to the Cairo protest plan would have been the activists’ knowledge of the relevant political issues and local geography, and their ability to motivate fellow activists. Even so, the more thoughtfully considered the protest was, the greater its chances of being successful, and of its protagonists avoiding arrest, or worse.
If we apply the same principle to everyday activities, there are impromptu elements of design in many aspects of our lives. Consider food. If you follow a recipe, you cannot be described as having designed the end result, because you will have produced it formulaically without the element of change that is essential to design. But if you improvise by deviating from the recipe or by making it up as you go along, then you could claim to have ‘designed’ the dish. Will describing that process as ‘design’ make a positive difference by making the food taste better? Possibly. Other skills, such as your ability to choose the best ingredients, knowledge of their idiosyncrasies and dexterity with cooking tools, will be more important, but the dish may very well seem more tempting had you paid more attention to the design elements of its preparation. Perhaps by being bolder in combining different flavours. Or by taking greater care over its presentation.
Adopting a more fluid definition of design, and recognizing its potential outside a commercial context, will not bring greater clarity. On the contrary, it is likelier to make design seem even more ambiguous by adding multiple new roles to its established ones. Yet, elementally, design will remain the same. Whether its objective is to produce a smaller, more user-friendly smartphone, a loftily ambitious project to reduce carbon emissions, or a makeshift shelter for someone who has lost their home, design will continue to be, as it always has been, an agent of change that can help us to organize our lives to suit our needs and wishes, and wields immense power to influence them, for better and for worse.
Perhaps the most compelling argument for embracing a more eclectic understanding of design is to consider the danger of continuing to ignore its potential. An example is dog breeding, where decades of anarchic, ill-considered attempts to control the development of different breeds of dogs have resulted in a design calamity with tragic consequences. There were no more than fifteen recognized dog breeds in Britain in 1815, but now there are over four hundred, and one hundred and fifty of them have official pedigree societies.41 Some of those breeds were nurtured for practical reasons. The loyal Dalmatian was originally a guard dog in the mountainous Croatian region of Dalmatia, then a fashionable carriage dog in eighteenth-century England. The plucky Lakeland terrier was bred to forage for vermin in the desolate valleys of the English Lake District. The spirited Jack Russell dates back to Trump, a small white and tan terrier whose flair for flushing out foxes so impressed her hunt-loving owner, the Reverend John Russell, that he decided to breed more dogs just like her in early nineteenth-century Oxford.42 But other types of dog have been bred for their aesthetic attributes, generally ones that endear them to humans and make them more marketable, such as tiny ‘teacup’ chihuahuas and goofy bulldogs with big heads and baby-like faces. Some of these dogs are, thankfully, robust, but others are sadly prone to hereditary weaknesses having been drawn from such narrow genetic pools for reasons relating to their appearance, rather than to their temperament.43
King Charles spaniels are among the most alarming examples, with brains too big for their skulls, while basset hounds are at risk of paranoid delusions, and Dobermann pinschers of narcolepsy.44 Bulldogs are vulnerable to a litany of health problems, including respiratory illnesses, skin infections, neurological disorders and difficulties with their eyes and ears. The impact on the health of individual dogs has become so grave that some kennel clubs refuse to register puppies with closely related parents, and responsible breeders are trying to create healthier versions of particularly vulnerable breeds.45 No one set out to redesign a species so radically. And it is difficult to believe that any breeder, not even the unscrupulous puppy-mill owners who cashed in on the craze for baby-faced bulldogs and teeny chihuahuas, intended to cause so much pain by producing sickly dogs with poor health and short life expectancies, yet some of them have done so. The genetic manipulation of the dog is a tragic example of what can happen when a sequence of changes is misconceived and poorly planned, rather than being designed efficiently. Would the process have benefited from the discipline and sagacity that design can offer? Quite possibly, though only if it was accompanied by the necessary veterinary and zoological knowledge. As to whether someone who describes him or herself as a designer would need to be involved, that is a different matter.