Out of the Studio and into the Flow of Socionatural Life

Design is evolving from its position of relative insignificance within business (and the larger envelope of nature), to become the biggest project of all. ... Massive Change is not about the world of design; it's about the design of the world.

Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries,Massive Change

A purely technocentric view of innovation is less sustainable now than ever. ... What we need is an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible ... that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore have an impact. Design thinking, the subject of this book, offers just such an approach.

Tim Brown,Change by Design

In a world in rapid and profound transformation, we are all designers. ... The more tradition is weakened, the more subjects must learn to design their own lives and shift from a prevalence of activities carried out in a traditional way to one in which choices are mainly of design.

Ezio Manzini,Design, When Everybody Designs

Statements on the rapidly changing, and increasingly transformative, character of design abound in the literature of the past decade. The intensification of the globalization of images and commodities fostered by markets and technology has led today's critical design theorists to advocate for new kinds of engagement between design and the world. This starts with everyday life but moves on to infrastructures, cities, the lived environment, medical technologies, food, institutions, landscapes, the virtual, and, in the long run, experience itself. The claims about design's potential new roles range from the significant to the earth shattering. A key question becomes: how does one design for a complex world? Instead of keeping on filling the world with stuff, what design strategies will allow us — humans — to lead more meaningful and environmentally responsible lives (Thackara 2004)? As some design researchers contend, we all live within a design cluster, that is, immersed in designs of all kinds, which means that design becomes "a category beyond categories" (Lunenfeld 2003, 10), opening up new spaces for linking theory, practice, and purpose, connecting vision and reality. This brings forth the endless process of discovering new territories for design through research (Laurel 2003).

To be sure, the majority of design treatises still maintain a fundamental orientation that is technocratic and market centered, and do not come close to questioning design's capitalistic nature. Many navigate in between, alternating between uncritical celebration and venturesome ideas and critiques. Design has its caustic critics as well, although few and far between. A well-known text by Hal Foster, for instance, finds that the pervasive, almost total character taken on by design today not only "abets a near-perfect circuit of production and consumption" but instantiates a "pan-capitalist present" (2002a, 192). According to Foster, this type of present effects a perpetual profiling of the commodity that drives the contemporary inflation of design. Whatever transgressive character postmodernism might have had, Foster argues, it has become routinized by design, contributing to the exhaustion of any critique under the label of the post or the neo. This "wising up" of commercial culture has fashioned the designed subjects of pancapitalism (Foster 2002b). Design has certainly been fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that has become pervasive since the 1980s (Dunne and Raby 2013). For Sanford Kwinter, the resulting "pop-libertarian aesthetic," according to which every aspect of our daily lives is susceptible to becoming a design objective (in affluent societies), has been accompanied by the capitulation of criticism in the academy and the public sphere to such trends. Nevertheless, asserting that "much more than our living rooms and silverware are at stake" (2007, 17) and acknowledging that it implies a highly developed form of rationality, Kwinter considers that design is also a vehicle for the deepest human aspirations and as such should be a matter of widespread concern.

This chapter looks at some of the most salient critical trends in design studies and practice. It discusses recent proposals for transforming design from an expert-driven process focused on objects and services within a taken-for-granted social and economic order toward design practices that are participatory, socially oriented, situated, and open ended and that challenge the business-as-usual mode of being, producing, and consuming. It highlights design frameworks that pay serious attention to questions of place, the environment, experience, politics, and the role of digital technologies in transforming design contexts. The chapter ends with a discussion of whether a critical design studies field — one that emerges at the intersection of critical social theory and design studies — can be said to exist. A main goal of the chapter is to prepare the ground for more detailed discussions of ontological design, transition design, design for social innovation, and autonomous design, particularly for those readers with little background in design studies. I start with an intuitive, but I believe analytically suggestive, entry into the nature of design.

"When Old Technologies Were New": Design's Arrival in Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo

It is often the case that highly accomplished literary works reveal essential aspects of human life and history with a sharpness and clarity that philosophy and the social sciences can hardly aspire to match. Such is the case, for instance, with One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1970), a novel that hides unsuspected lessons about the early phases of the deployment of technology and design in so-called traditional societies. Let us start by recalling the book's beginning, often considered one of the most perfect opening paragraphs of world literature:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set...