Kolbi Stewart – Can good design change the world?
The title of Warren Berger’s latterly made public book –’Glimmer : How Design Can change your Life and perhaps Even the World’ — is bold.
The typical understanding of what’design’ means to many of us is the way something looks or feels : the look of an iPod or a flick poster, furniture or everyday appliances, for example. what if it was, as Berger announces,’a way of having a look at the world with an eye toward changing it?’
‘The premise of this book is that design is applicable to just about any challenge,’ Berger writes. ‘And its beliefs are accessible to anyone.’
New and improved technology — which is also less expensive — and increased connectivity are creating a class of’citizen designers,’ who are looking to find solutions to old Problems, Berger asserts.
‘The democratization of design that began 1 / 4 century ago with the advent of Apple’s Macintosh PC has moved to a completely new level in the age of interactive, social network media,’ he writes.
CNN lately spoke to Berger about design, technology and Bruce Mau, a designer he cooperated with to pen the book.
Below are excerpts from the interview. They’ve been edited for length and clarity.
CNN : How can design change the world?
Berger : When people talk about design changing the world, it has a tendency to sound a little grand and daft, because they think of design as, in one slipped swoop, changing the world and solving our issues. What design basically can do, it can solve issues on a case-by-case basis around the world. As it does that, it changes the world, as it changes the reality for folks wherever the situation is occurring.
If design can change water delivery in a certain part of the Earth, then it changes that part of the world for those people. That is the way design changes the globe.
CNN : When we speak of design, we often think about the look of a book jacket or a Web site, or we think of design. What do you suspect of when a person claims design?
Berger : it is a word which has about 1,000,000 different definitions. What I use in my book — the working model in my head — is that I like to think of it as creative problem solving. Basically, design tries to take on a challenge or a need and work out how to figure it out.
It often does so thru creative processes that involve really studying folks to figure out what’s lacking in their lives, what’s needed and going thru plenty of blue skying to come up with lots of ideas. And then going through a technique of prototyping or testing those ideas out to work out if they really work. That’s's sort of my model of design, and it doesn’t apply to every kind of design.
There’s a creative sort of design that’s's really a bit more different, that’s more self-expression. But when you talk the sort of design I am talking about in the book, it’s more just any of creative problem-solving.
CNN : With that definition, does the problem solving necessarily have to come from what we conceive of as pro designers, or can it be just anybody?
Berger : When you enlarge the definition of design, it’s no longer limited to professional designers. In fact, designers now who are taking on big Problems are doing so — if you look at the giant design firms like Smart Design or Bruce Mau Design — what they are doing is a very multidisciplinary approach to solving Problems. They’re using designers, they are using engineers — lots of the time, it is a terribly multifaceted problem, and you want a lot of different people in making the solution. That is’s one of the big trends in design now.
everybody’s a designer now, in a way. Folks now have more opportunities to design all alone than they ever did before. They’ve got more tools to do it. They have a little more understanding how to creatively solve Problems and express themselves than they did ever before. There’s a bit of a democratization of design going on now.
About the Author
Kolbi Stewart
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