William Morris, Bauhaus
What is design?
Let's into the responsible design
Design is not only a technology, but also a culture. Design is an act of creation, a process of creating a more rational way of life.
It is the construction of the relationship between the designer's ideals and the real world.
What it creates, or rather provides, is merely a possibility for my interaction with the outside world, a proposal to change my way of life, and a certain creative attitude implicit within it.
John Heskett - Due to the "modes of expression" in modern society, design is becoming "both vulgar and incomprehensible."
It is not really that design has “become” incomprehensible; rather, when people deliberately avoid the basic reality that design, while acting as a “social critic,” can itself also become an object of criticism, the “vulgarity” of design turns into a confusion that seems difficult to explain.
Design for the real world - Preface to the first edition:
"In this age of mass production when everything must be
planned and designed, design has become the most powerful
tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and,
by extension, society and himself). This demands high social
and moral responsibility from the designer. It also demands
greater understanding of the people by those who practice design
and more insight into the design process by the public.
Not a single volume on the responsibility of the designer, no
book on design that considers the public in this way, has ever
been published anywhere.
In February of 1968 Fortune magazine published an article
that foretold the end of the industrial design profession. Pre-
dictably, designers reacted with scorn and alarm. But I feel
that the main arguments of the Fortune article are valid. It
is about time that industrial design, as we have come to know
it, should cease to exist. As long as design concerns itself with
confecting trivial “toys for adults," killing machines with
gleaming tailfins, and “sexed-up” shrouds for typewriters,
toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to
exist.
"
"All are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is
design, for design is basic to all human activity."
Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose mean-
ingful order.