DESIGN

The best design achievements yield unforeseen benefits for unforeseen stake holders in unforeseen circumstances, so it is not the designer’s job to know everything and everyone that will be affected by a given project. To design well is only to conceive with care, and with an eye toward beauty and simplicity.

Yet, William McDonough, a leading industrial designer and architect, claims the first and ultimate question of design to be this: “How do we love all the children of all species for all time?” Such a question may as well be put not just to designers, but to all occupations, and, for that matter, to every human being. Design is implicit in everything we do, since human action follows human intent, which in turn follows human interests and motives. Design is a path from motives to action: conception.

Herein lies the problem of design itself as a concept. What, after all, are motives? McDonough takes a critical stance in his definition of design: “the first signal of human intention.” Here he suggests that motives themselves should be subject to conscious design, citing Nazi death camps as examples of design for “the worst of human intentions.” How do you design human motives without designing individual persons?

Alas, to view design as “the first signal of human intention” is to hope that design is implicit not just in human affairs -- but in nature. Even if we could design a human being to fit our physical, emotional, moral, and spiritual specifications, this creature would still be subject to our own motivations, which, by definition, are ultimately governed by laws we did not conceive, let alone create.

In this sense, there is no such thing as artifice, if by artifice we mean a thing not found in nature, but only in civilization. This is because civilization is itself, insofar as it grows from motives, a natural phenomenon.

What remains when artifice is detached from the concept of design? From a critical standpoint: we’re left with design as the first signal of nature’s intention, whether we’re talking about plants or prisons. As part of nature’s design, are we meant to decipher the signal? That we can ask such a question, or even conceive the notion of design in the first place, is in itself a compelling signal.