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Questions
Questions about the future are on everyone's mind as we enter the countdown to the millennium. And concern for the future of design is no exception. But the question of design's future cannot be asked without first framing it in relation to a model of the world. Historically, the production of world models originated with those who held economic and political power. The narrative of a world transformed from agriculture to industry is generally accepted as the universal paradigm of change along with a further evolution into the current 'electronic age' or 'Age of Information.' Design, according to this image, will become more and more of a high-tech practice with product designers creating everything from miniature wearable computers to complex home multimedia centers, automobile navigation systems, and products for smart houses. The seeds for this future have already been sown and manufacturers are scrambling to prepare themselves for a rich harvest.
However, in my estimation, this model is a flawed one. It accounts for only a very small segment of the world's population and does not recognize the dangers of creating such a wide gap between those who are well-off and have access to the most advanced technology and those who are poor and can't keep up. I prefer instead a different model that brings to the foreground all the peoples of the world and not just those in the most advanced economies. Such a model does not preclude high-tech products but it puts them into relation with many other kinds of products as well as a number of issues — economic, social, and ecological — that would be otherwise obscured. This model also recognizes the value and necessity of design in various settings from the poorest regions to the most developed. Thus, the question I ask about the future of design is what will it be for all people and not just for those in the most economically privileged situations.
A growing intellectual culture for design
To address this question designers have to reinvent the way they think about their practice in order to imagine its future in a more complex and multifacted world. There are numerous signs of such activity, and further developments are promising. First, I would like to make reference to the profusion of design journals that have begun to sprout up in recent years. These include Design Issues , the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design , Émigré and the Design Management Journal in the United States; Design Studies, Information Design Journal, and the Journal of Design History in Great Britain; Temes de Disseny in Spain; tipoGráfica in Argentina; Design Recherche in France; formdiskurs in Germany; Estudos em Design and Arcos in Brazil; Arttu in Finland; and Oullim in Korea. The existence of these journals as places to publish more reflective and scholarly writings is beginning to create a global design culture of great intellectual value that did not exist before. Both designers and researchers from other fields are beginning to think about design in ways that have not been done before, and this is leading invariably to new ideas for practice. Writers and scholars with distinct voices are emerging. Through their writing we are starting to understand design within a more elaborate set of issues than in the past. These issues cover quite a wide range from environmental concerns, to the nature of creativity, the rhetoric of products, and the changing role of design within manufacturing firms.
The need for more advanced education
Concomitant with the upsurge in new design publications is a growing interest in more advanced education for designers, notably doctoral degrees. This idea has now been adopted by a number of universities throughout the world and is being seriously considered by others. A recent conference on 'Doctoral Education in Design,' held at the Ohio State in October 1998 attracted participants from nineteen countries. The interest in doctoral education is a sign of recognition that designers need to be better prepared than they have been in the past to confront the tasks before them.
As part of the growing focus on design research, there is interest in a new academic field, 'design studies,' whose contours and content are actively being discussed at conferences and in journals. One could argue that all of these intellectual developments are being driven by the awareness of an emerging situation for designing that requires more knowledge and flexibility than in the past. But not just technical knowledge. Knowledge of design's social effects is equally important. In this moment of rapid technological innovation we need to be more conscious than we have been in the past of the impact new technologies make so we can prevent the coalescing of technological systems that we will ultimately recognize to be detrimental. We must also cultivate a wider vision of life on the entire planet so we can better understand the relations between social and economic situations in different parts of the world.
Collapsing boundaries of design practice
In actual practice, the boundaries of once distinct design professions are blurring, and a new, more comprehensive approach to design is beginning to surface. This has been noted by, among others, Augusto Morello, the President of ICSID, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. Morello argues that "Such a 'Great Transformation' will sweep away the old classification of product, graphic, and shelter design and impose a new policy: a newly coordinated strategy for design promotion, professional education, and the support of designers and related activities/professions." The prospect of such a transformation will challenge every aspect of the current design culture from the organization and promotion of professional practice to employment opportunities, and education. Design educators, in particular, will have to reevaluate their curricula in order to reconfigure them so as to produce competent young designers who are prepared to face new tasks.
New projects for designers
One result of this thinking about integrative design practices is that we have begun to imagine new projects for designers on a grander scale than before. The city, in particular, is a site that calls out for more design intervention, not only in an aesthetic sense but also in terms of creating better methods of delivering goods and services and establishing opportunities for personal fulfillment through what the late E.F. Schumacher called "good work."
We also need to recognize how design thinking can contribute to improving the multifarious micro-enterprises that operate throughout the world. The micro-credit schemes that originated in Bangladesh, for example, have created entrepreneurial opportunities for large numbers of people in developing countries. These projects can be greatly enhanced by new forms of design thinking applied to businesses at the low end of the economic spectrum.
On the high-tech end, we will need to gain a much better understanding of electronic space so that we can design for it as a compliment to physical space rather than as a substitute for it. Of course, the web is here to stay and therefore designers must learn to think responsibility about it so it becomes a useful resource. In order to design responsibly for the web, we need a much better understanding of its potential as a social tool.
As I have been arguing in this essay, the future of design that is most worth contemplating is one that operates with a deep understanding of the world's complexity and a profound sense of human welfare. For the most part, we have known design as a part of product marketing and, of course, that will continue. But we need to invent new models of practice. To do this we would recognize that designing is basically a way to think about the world that results in a product. This product may exist within the market or it may not. Besides the challenge of imagining new products within the market we have to figure out how to pay for those that will be created outside of it. And that too is a project of design.
Victor Margolin 1999
Victor Margolin in Professor of Art and Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a well respected member of the international design community. A prolific lecturer, writer, and editor, he has countless books, articles, and other publications on design to his credit. His latest publications include: The Struggle for Utopia: Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997) and The Idea of Design (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996). He also edited Design Discourse: History Theory Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and wrote the introductory and closing essays. He is the co-founder and editor of Design Issues: A Journal of History , Theory, and Criticism. In addition to serving on the SICA Board of Directors, he serves on International Advisory Boards for Journal of Design History [London] ,Information Design Journal [London], tipoGráfica [Buenos Aires]Techniques de la Conception [Paris], formdiskurs [Frankfurt-am-Main], and Arcos [Rio de Janeiro]