It's largely an ivory tower ego playground for the financially elite, but with a creative side. It's a lot of relentless self-marketing with a generous helping of whatever buzzwords are in at the moment.
The designers are easy to spot. They wear boldly coloured look-at-me glasses and clothing. It's like a menagerie of rare birds. Find them at international Expos, Bienalles and design festivals (if in doubt, seek out a pavilion).
Their ideas are largely stale and reused. These people are born rich and die rich and affect very little positive change in the time between.
But - remove the glamour and apply design thinking to hard, thankless but important problems and it can be a pretty meaningful and worthwhile profession IMO.
Sadly, with increasing wealth inequality, the rich are better able to keep out the talented but poor, with things like unpaid internships, access to professional networks gated by exorbitant college fees, insane rents in key cities, etc. There was a period in the mid 20 century when just talent and drive could get you very far. Should be no surprise that that led to a blossoming in the creative fields, and the converse more lately has led to their impoverishment.
There are many architects, establishers or followers of certain doctrines, who feel the same way about built structures: That they're designed to solve issues related to human movement, and that there's one right way to build them. That if you build things in that correct way, and ignore the kitsch opinions of the proletariat, people will grow happier or be more effective. (Sometimes despite themselves.)
I don't necessarily agree with these views, but a quick glance at popular American suburban "architecture" -- possibly the worst of all worlds -- is enough to lend it serious weight.
American suburban architecture is pretty bad, but at least it's disposable. Generations to come won't have to live in these things.
In city planning and building design, the problem is even more severe. The planner doesn't know what people are going to settle where, what their desired needs are (or are going to be), and so on. That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as an awful solution, nor that you can't say anything at all. (A house probably needs windows, and you probably shouldn't stick a polluting industrial zone right next to a bunch of them.) It just means that trying to "micromanage" a city or complex building fails - for the same reason that micromanaging an organization fails.
(This is a requisite variety or "seeing like a state" argument.)
The biggest example is of course car dominance, which was great until it isn't, but all sorts of micro details about how humans use space vary on a day to day basis depending on what they're using it for.
Remember when people built apple 30 pin connectors into furniture?
Central planning is a risky move - you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. When it works well, we all benefit. When it works badly, we all suffer for it.
End of the day, design can be from architects imposing their views or tax collectors and road engineers doing theirs. The worst design comes from the genius planners, the best usually from people working with well defined constraints of money, taxes and build expense.
The state of American architecture and life is almost completely based on tax policy and allocation of resources to roadways. Our cities of vacant office towers are almost completely a tax story.
Absolutely not the case. American suburbs are the result of massive planning restriction and financial subsidy.
Sure, most of it is ridiculous and stupid, you expect that when you brainstorm. Only in environments where you’re allowed to propose any idea regardless of how ridiculous or stupid they are can you uncover certain types of gems of base ideas.
This take of designers being superior being to engineers is something I consistently observed among designers over the decade.
Here is a light-hearted video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvU5dmu4sl8
It's a bit like saying 'language is so damaging, every argument I ever had was a result of language'.
Personally, I like data-driven design. As in: ask a designer why, and you know why this is good or bad design. The 'why' should be linked to real data and decisions based on them.
From wikipedia. It's like "Foundation Models", they successfully branded the concept but nobody cites them anymore
I worked before with the IBM Design Thinking Field Guide [2]. That offers some hands-on examples to work with users and stakeholders. Now, when i think about this, you may use Design Thinking to solve social-problems. With all the benefits and issues (like feature creep) you have in software engineering.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554...
[2] https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/spring18/cs130/hw/IBM-Design...
So things like the cotton gin or Ford's use of interchangeable parts don't count as design or somehow didn't change the world?
How is volunteering at soup kitchens more effective at changing the world than interchangeable parts?
And still yet...are you wanting to change the world for the better?
could you frame innovation problems as "design" problems? sure.
was the cotton gin framed as a "design" problem in the sense that it had some sort of epistemological lineage to the "design" discipline when it was invented? I suspect not.
the worst thing design ever did for itself was frame itself as "the" human-centered problem solving discpline. everyone is a human-centered problem-solver in the most general sense, in the same way that everything is a "design" problem in the most general sense.
A slight nitpick to the section of Bauhaus - the goal was not industrialization, and in fact in the early days that "group" was completely against industrialization. Gropius was the first director of Bauhaus, but the school existed previously in other forms led by Henry van de Velde, who only left Germany because of WWI and the fact he was Belgian. And in fact, there was a clash in the group already in 1914 at one of their first exhibitions, where one fraction strongly advocated for industrialization and "typed" production. But van de Velde won, and Gropius sided with him. If you visit van de Velde's house, it's clear what he was thinking. The house was designed with his family and his work in mind. In a way that his many children and family could live there and he would have his space and peace and quiet to work. So the idea was to have living conditions adapted to the needs of the people, but it's clear that without industrial scale it would only be available to the rich. But still, "form follows function" is not necessarily industrial. Van de Velde's house is classical in appearance, but still the starting point was function not form.