Design: hope for everyone, craft for some

Bumper comments on last week's post, so let's mine this place a little deeper. Nice piece of writing by Rodney Fitch in Design Week. He makes bold claims for design’s ubiquitous importance: “everyone should try to understand design’s power and significance”; and later “inside everyone, there lives a designer trying to get out”. Everyone.

Bumper comments on last week's post, so let's mine this place a little deeper. Nice piece of writing by Rodney Fitch in Design Week. He makes bold claims for design’s ubiquitous importance: “everyone should try to understand design’s power and significance”; and later “inside everyone, there lives a designer trying to get out”. Everyone.

Of this “everyone” I’m exercised by who exactly stands to benefit most by an awakening of their inner designer. Practically, we need to break down this everyone. Not merely for the sake of illustration, I’m focusing on a very concise group at the moment. We’ve developed a proposal to trial design training as an element of rehabilitation or occupational therapy follow-up for people with spinal injuries. The use of design to improve the independence and fulfilment of people whose capability is limited by age, illness or disability – through assistive technology, for example - is recognised and quite well-rehearsed. But while the discourse concentrates on the development of devices and systems that can be made available to individuals – designed for them – our interest is also in enhancing the ability of these individuals to design for themselves; to understand the insights and processes that designers use to see and solve problems. We say design can increase people's resourcefulness; these are people whose resources have been suddenly and dramatically depleted.

Increasingly expansive, Fitch cites William Morris’s rejoinder to the question “What is the purpose of Art and Design?” “To give hope, Madam, to give hope” in support of his own candid declaration that design is the hope of the world. The world. Once again substituting my more concise cohort, the introductory design training I’m proposing for spinal injury patients has the same essential message of hope. The purpose is to give confidence and comfort to people facing a life in which independence may be an extreme challenge: there’s something out there that can help you and it’s called design; here’s how you start thinking about it.

I’m convening a small group of designers in the next few weeks to figure this “how” out. Meanwhile specialist spinal units, the spinal injury charities, occupational therapists and a small number of spinally injured designers and non-designers have responded with enthusiasm to this idea.  A senior psychiatrist told me - with an agility I had not anticipated from a profession so distant from design - that he thought this had tremendous potential for mental health patients as well. So far so good.

Fitch’s observations contract to the more specific: “design is a universal language more capable than any other of transcending boundaries”; “design is the least private of the arts”; until with “design is the handmaiden of innovation” we do start to lose the plot slightly in the miasma of innovation, service and change agency. This is merely the hazard of invoking “everyone”.  In this fog, and in conclusion, he proffers the beacon of craft. Design really matters “because it’s what you do, so care about it and do it well”. I can’t be sure, but I think he’s invoking a good old fashioned Protestant work-ethic which transfers to all trades.

We need to understand how some people’s craft can deliver hope for everyone, for it is not self-evident. One prominent individual keeps telling me good design is uplifting and inspiring and that this is all we need to know. I'm not convinced. Why, then, is good design not ubiquitous? I think we might get somewhere by breaking down the everyone to the true dramatis personae. I've submitted  mine; whom would you cast as your design agents?