Regarding Julian Worrall's Nov. 6 article, "Design turns over a greener leaf": I generally agree with the idea that we should enter a design recession. As someone who has been practicing for the past 20 years in Europe, the United States, and extensively in Japan, my feeling is that due to media frenzy and intervention by big business, design is dead.
It may sound dramatic, but the real purpose of design -- to make people's lives better, to deliver tools and function in a simple way, and to hopefully make people feel good about using and living with them -- has been forgotten. While it's great that designers of all kinds are looking at sustainable technologies and reuse of materials etc., the problem is that we have too many designers, and too many manufacturers who will not question design issues until it's too late.
Design has become a tool/servant of big business and media in order to brand products and services and differentiate them from the rest. It has become commodified just like the technologies and services it is supposed to package. What we need to be thinking about is design for the 21st century, not modifying last century's thinking.
Modernism, which we are still essentially practicing, was a radical political and art movement that the French led as a way of shedding a moribund past. Don't we need to be thinking in these radical terms now, rather than just making cosmetic adjustments to the old ways as a nod to new and tougher times? My fear is that if we don't, there really will be no design in any meaningful way for the future -- just better looking landfill.
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