On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, “Who here thinks that design can change the world?” Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck.
My professor wasn’t the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek began his best-selling book, Design for the Real World, with a similar message. “There are professions more harmful than industrial design,” he wrote, but “very few.” By designing and popularizing products that “pollute the air we breathe”—including cars, which are responsible for “murder on a mass-production basis”—he argued, “designers have become a dangerous breed.” But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good. For Papanek, it was “the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environment (and, by extension, society and himself).”
Many working designers today echo Papanek’s ambivalence about the profession. In her fascinating, rigorously researched new book, The Invention of Design, the designer and educator Maggie Gram shows how the field transcended its humble origins as the mere art of decoration and became a more ambitious, and more conflicted, discipline. Designers are responsible for more things than ever before: hardware, software, services, infrastructure. Many designers aren’t just trying to beautify the world; they want to make it a better place. In the process, they have tackled societal issues such as racial injustice and economic inequality, with mixed results. Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can’t; the history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference. Gram’s book is critical of the hubris and techno-optimism that have led design thinking astray, but it is also hopeful, imagining how the discipline might eventually live up to its stated ideals.
In the 19th century, designers were typically commercial artists who worked to make everyday objects more attractive to consumers. But Gram’s book shows how, over the course of the 20th century, practitioners such as Eva Zeisel helped shape a new way of thinking about the profession. Born in 1906 to a highly educated Hungarian Jewish family, Zeisel became, at 18, the youngest woman to join the potters’ guild of Budapest. Her first job was to make prototypes of pots to be mass-produced at a factory—a skill that brought her to Berlin and then the Soviet Union. But her career there was cut short by Stalin’s Great Purge, and Zeisel moved to New York in 1938, where she taught at the Pratt Institute and designed dinnerware that was exhibited and sold at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work married Old World craftsmanship with industrial-manufacturing practices, and showed that popular modernist styles, which were often seen as rigid and circumscribed, could be executed with what Zeisel called “real elegance.”
Zeisel was one of many European émigrés who shaped American design culture. In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art school where first-year students were given a foundation in color, form, and fundamental aesthetic principles. The school was initially funded by the German state of Thuringia, but when the government began shifting to the right in the 1920s, the Bauhaus had to find a different business model. It began to partner with companies to sell its own products, which made the curriculum more explicitly pre-professional. As Gram writes, the Bauhaus began “using machines to mass-produce objects that worked,” including chairs, lamps, and other household items.
When the school eventually closed and Gropius fled Nazi Germany for America, he brought the Bauhaus’s ideas to Harvard’s design school as a professor. Gropius’s approach to industrial design—epitomized by the famous dictum “Form follows function”—was enormously influential; the Bauhaus’s synthesis of art, technology, and practicality shaped America’s understanding of design over the following decades. In a 2003 interview, Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, remarked that “most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.” But, as he argued, “it’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Jobs’s reframing marked the culmination of a decades-long cultural shift. By the end of the 20th century, design students were typically categorized into one of two buckets: industrial designers who made physical, mass-produced products, and graphic designers who communicated information with visuals. But following the rapid rise of the technology sector during the early 21st century, many design students gravitated toward careers in that industry, where they worked on intangible products such as interfaces and software systems. As Gram writes, designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should “be students of human culture.” Here, the field benefited from another kind of émigré: social scientists who, faced with a declining academic-job market, entered the tech industry instead.
One contributor was Lucy Suchman, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984 with a Ph.D. in anthropology, then took a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center as a researcher. In an influential study, Suchman placed two successful computer scientists in a room to see whether they could, as Gram writes, use “a brand-new, feature-rich Xerox photocopier” without issues. They couldn’t. It turned out, as Gram observes dryly, that learning how to use an unfamiliar machine “is never as simple as technologists want it to be.” Other tech companies also hired social scientists, who became a new kind of design professional: user researchers. In theory, they were meant to instill a more “human-centered” approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience.
Eventually, some designers and design educators grew to feel that the “problems worth solving,” as Gram writes, were the “wicked problems” of society—a term coined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 to include issues such as crumbling public infrastructure, education inequality, and poverty. Teachers encouraged their students to apply design to things that really mattered—not just the creation of mass-produced consumer goods. And companies such as Ideo, a design consultancy founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, helped turn design from a specialist skill into a general-purpose one, selling the concept of “design thinking” to corporate America.
Design thinking, as Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in 2008, “uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible.” While Ideo employed design thinking to invent user-friendly insulin pens and an updated PalmPilot, the company also suggested that its approach to identifying issues and brainstorming solutions could be applied to all kinds of problems—including the “wicked” ones plaguing corporations, educational institutions, health care, and government. Corporate America fell in love with the idea, and Gram describes how design thinking became an almost “spiritual movement,” with Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design, as its bible. Its influence extended around the world: In 2006, an advertising agency in Bogotá, Colombia, was asked by the government to research, prototype, and launch an ad campaign imploring a group of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighters to demobilize.
But design thinking often disappointed its disciples. Take Gram’s example of Gainesville, Florida, where in the 2010s, about a third of the city’s residents lived below the poverty line. In 2013, the city’s mayor asked Anthony Lyons, the director of a newly formed economic-development committee, to turn the city’s prospects around. Lyons looked to Silicon Valley for inspiration and hired Ideo for a two-month, $200,000 project to research how Gainesville could become a more “competitive” city. Lyons soon became city manager, and quickly implemented Ideo’s suggestions—including creating a new logo, establishing trainings for city employees in design thinking, and renaming the Department of Planning and Development the Department of Doing.
These sorts of changes, Gram writes, had a “tenuous relationship” to the real challenges facing Gainesville, one of the most racially unequal places in the country. Black residents had lower high-school-graduation rates and higher unemployment rates than white residents, and Ideo’s more surface-level solutions could do little to address that reality. Lyons’s eagerness to redesign Gainesville to be “the most user friendly city in the world,” as Ideo advocated, ignored the expertise of existing city employees. There was low morale and high turnover, and when Lyons himself resigned after a few years, a resident told a local university’s newspaper, “Gainesville is not a Silicon Valley startup.” The trouble, as The Gainesville Sun’s editorial board wrote, was that Lyons, despite being an “agent of change” in the city, failed to “build consensus.” He didn’t have a design problem to solve; he had a political problem.
The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an “extraordinary career.” No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, “design is one of the terms that has replaced the word ‘revolution’!” That might be the problem. “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.” But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what’s profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work.
The solution, though, isn’t to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? When it comes to making the world a better place, Gram writes, “design can contribute to that project, and it should.” In 2000, the designer Sylvia Harris helped revise the U.S. census to be more accessible and comprehensible, leading to a 2 percent higher participation rate compared with the 1990 census. This meant that more Americans, especially those from marginalized and undercounted communities, were represented. In her work, Harris exemplified a different path for the profession: one that seeks to understand the needs of the community being served and emphasizes participatory design. Designers’ instincts for aesthetics, utility, and usability can play a crucial role in addressing society’s “wicked problems.” But they can’t solve them alone.
Illustration Sources: Pixelimage / Getty; KTSDesign / Getty; J Studios / Getty.
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