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gState of Design Report
State of Design Report June 2021 1!
In 2019 the UK Design Council declared “Whatever the question, design has an
answer.” While not quite so bold the British designer Jay Osgerby maintains that
“Design is the Answer to a Very Difficult Question.” Both valiant statements play
on Cedric Price’s massively exploited conundrum “Technology is the answer, but
what was the question?”
A superficial trawl of the web reveals – “Big Data Is the Answer … But What Is the
Question?” – “Design Thinking Is Not The Answer - Especially If You Don’t Know The
Question” – “Universal Design – The Answer to Everything?” – “If Design-Based
Research is the Answer, What is the Question?” And the web also exposes curiously
aligned beliefs that “Love or war or music or summer or Jesus or art or wool (or
countless other subjects) is the answer.”
Perhaps Price was already playing with Shakespeare’s mission for Hamlet “To be, or
not to be, that is the question.” It seems that the answers already surround us. It’s
the question we don’t know. But its vitally important to place before this catechism
the simple fact is that each designer creates their precursors. Their work modifies
our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. Price asked what WAS the
question and everyone after him writes what IS the question as if there is no
conception of the past. WAS used to be the totally artificial world; a future
responsible. Whereas IS is now the totally financial world; a future already
mortgaged. In which case we can only ask - was the past simple, is the present
perfect and will the future be affordable?
In 1990 Donella H. Meadows’ wrote the “State of the Village Report”, which
presented a framework for understanding the world as a combination of physical,
economic, and social relationships by imagining the world was a village of 1000
people. Scaling down the numbers was a very palpable way to change mindsets and
help build awareness about what an individual could do to help manage the complex
environmental, social and economic systems of which we are all a part.
State of Design Report June 2021 2!
Background images: AMO & Rem Koolhaas., "Countryside: A Report", Köln, Taschen, 2020, pp324-351
State of Design Report June 2021 3!
If, as the Design Council asserts, design always has an answer, is design’s apparent
omniscience an accurate depiction of the state of design? To answer this question
we asked our researchers in the school of design at the RCA to report on the state of
design:
If all the answers are already there, designers could focus on designing tools for
managing the complexity of the world without adding to it, shaping a balanced
relationship between us and our environment.
It is the scientific approach/method/lens that allows design to make that claim -
something that design has a love and hate relationship with and its imbalance is
sometimes essential (e.g., creativity, experimentation, innovation) and sometimes
disastrous.
If design always has an answer it demonstrates an over- (and perhaps hopeless)
confidence in our capacity for knowledge. Fundamentally, the ‘answer’ is
underpinned by the correct moral framework for the ideal end (at least,
pragmatically ideal end); how can we design that?
Design has the potential to communicate meaning between boundaries and to
support and transform the perception of different ways of thinking. There is
therefore a responsibility to understand other ways of thinking, professions and
fields. This responsibility is to be persistent and ignorant to the uncovered content
of the Other. This Other can be the technology, but also the issues that the
technology may want to address.
Design is the awareness of the distinct nature of different villages
Although humans create the problem, only human designers can solve it.
Design to be approaches for understanding purpose through problems for the
development of balancing human and environmental innovation.
Design should take on its imaginative skill sets and bring specialists together to
develop and work towards possible, desirable future scenarios to avoid problems
that emerge and not merely looking for answers for problems that have emerged
already as it is used mainly today. Not really a state of design now, but what its
possible potentials can be.
State of Design Report June 2021 4!
a. Design is asking itself questions where the world could have the answer
b. Design could be delivering open answers that can be assumed and recaptured
by those who want it.
The state of design can apply messy methods for re-nurturing.
In this complex, dynamic, and interconnected context, design should not only be
about fixing problems, answering questions, but also about iterating and
reframing questions.
What progress have we made in bridging the gap between technology and
society? Moving technology to society rather than society towards technology.
Designing for unknowable technologies. Technology is the answer, but is the
question ours to ask? [Revisiting Cedric Price’s original 1966 question]
The creeping smartness of technology is unmooring our capacity to own the
question about whether technology is the answer.
If whatever the question, design has an answer, then what underpins design or
gives us the license to make that claim?
Does the right answer and right question even exist? If so, who approves or
confirms that? Is it a designer's patent to research and report the question and
answer?
If we designers are a product of the same structures that created the "problems"
we aim to address, then how could we have the answers?
What is the relationship between questioner and answer?
Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those of machines of
flesh and blood …, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless
we ask the right questions…..The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil
knocks at our door. (Norbert Wiener, The Human use of Human Beings, 1954)
State of Design Report June 2021 5!
Is knowing the answer but not the question in contrast to, or similar to design
experimentation which is always about using a form of technology in an
unknowable way?
I wonder what ‘non designers’ see as the state of design? Do they care?
As long as we are forever limited by problems we will be ambushed by the
unthinkable and unknowable. We need a new model for design.
Design for the present is combining knowledge of the past with the technology of
the future
The state of design in 2021 revolves around design guiltiness. Nowadays we
design for empathy, compassion, trust, care, or humility …. Long are the days of
magazine covers, number ones, personal statements, or the sublime.
Suppose design can propose an answer to the question, who will take
responsibility to deliver, implement and look after the answer? Should bringing the
answer be the climax of a designer's work? Do future designers still focus on
question and answer as designer's top two focal points? If future designers still
retain "question' and "answer" as the main interest of the designer, do we (as a
designer today) feel it is the right state of design in the future?
If design has "an" answer and the answer is the result of human intention, then
how can we ensure the answers we elect through design, speak for those which
can not ask the question, yet are touched by the answer?
Technology is the answer, but is it only humans who are asking the question?
Design realises that it is in the middle of a very important phase of its own
disciplinary development. Design could not provide all answers to the pandemic, it
could not provide all questions to ask to avoid supply chains breaking down, shed
light away from the dominant thrive for vaccination towards humanitarian crises,
hunger or social, political and economical conflicts. Yet, design did not stop asking
questions, did not stop but rather fostered building interdisciplinary networks and
entered unknown territories - but is it enough? There is movement, but is it
enough movement to really progress design further?
State of Design Report June 2021 6!
Design strives to approach issues of the future with tools from the past. When a
solution starts to fall apart at the seams, design shifts abruptly to the next state of
the art. To put it another way, designers are trapped in a never-ending game of
tag with the future.
Design is an imminent crisis! What has become the central dogma of late-20th
and early 21st-century design, namely, ‘to design is to devise courses of action
aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’, bears all the hallmarks
of a ‘practice-cum-science’ espoused by a rational subjectivity that knows what is
preferable and how to bring it into being. Design needs to respond to the problem
that it helped bring into being by becoming other than itself - - - Design must un-
design its own designing, but in so doing, it cannot make this a design project.
design must become unrecognisable to itself.
Design today, in the majority of cases, is operating in two conditions, universal
solutions and isolated solutions, where both are developed based on pre-packed
or revolutionary ideas for predicted and forecasted problems rather than existing
needs.
Design is at loss when the role of design or that of the designer is seen as the
magician who can brighten up the world and polish strains with some magic tools,
but when you scratch the surface many are not aware of the fact that design
interventions deeply infiltrate into the social, economic and political systems we
are surrounded with.
If design ‘always has an answer’ – a key question is cui bono? Does design
perpetuate itself as the oracle and all questions must go through the ‘design’ lens
– a problem or answer as stated is already in a past state and perhaps keeps
viewing the problem in a static past state but should look to a dynamic real-life
ongoing process (a set of evolving questions) that could be met with evolving
dynamic responses (that continue to evolve) that incorporates varieties of
designer and non-designer points of view.
It's perhaps less about Design (always) having the answers but more about the
capability in design to set a series of questions along the continuum and thereby
the right direction of travel, including the right velocity (speed over time) and
acceleration (change in speed over time) to get there. The velocity and
acceleration in how we design has to be tailored to the need and gear selected
accordingly. Without design you end up getting stuck in singular destinations,
velocities, accelerations. With design you don’t always have to be in one gear.
The state of design is described by those who claim to know the state of design.
State of Design Report June 2021 7!
State of Design Report June 2021 8!
Signatories
Sabrina Recoules Quang, Idrees Rasouli, Algy Falconer, Yurie Suzuki, Petra Müeller
Czernetsky, Charles Morgan, Damian Chapman, Elisabeth Krenkler, Rute Fiadeiro,
Sarah Britten Jones, Selin Zileli, Fernando Galdon, Chris Moore, Prakash Jayakumar,
Filippo Sanzeni, Craig Bremner, Ashley Hall.
RCA
June 2021