Designing Chairs vs Changing the World

When I look back at my time in undergrad school, amongst the endless hours of work and play, I think of the time spent at the canteen. Canteen was the place where we drank tonnes of highly caffeinated chai, sketched design solutions with twigs on the loose soil and chatted about things that interested us. I remember getting into an argument with a senior of mine about human accomplishment. Who was smarter – the guy who discovered penicillin or the guy who designed the Barcelona Chair. I said Alexander Flemming was the winner and my senior was the opinion that the medal of accomplishment should be given to Meis Van Der Rohe for designing this awesome chair. Not sure who won the argument. Avinash (my senior) did mention something regarding design change and how a simple chair challenged the way people perceived design and what it represented. It is almost like Coco Chanel’s corset-less shirts. They were expensive and elite but represented a shift in how women dressed. I would guess that Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum did that for Architecture, so did Corbusiers Villa Savoye in France.

This article is more in reaction to Maria Popova’s article called Design : Sit or Stand? which was in reaction to Alissa Walker’s article in Good Magazine called ‘Why I write about design now’. Design is meant to solve problems but it also has a bigger agenda than that. It changes how people perceive society. Design is the representation of the spirit of the age. I don’t condone $6000 sofa sectionals but I don’t think that designers need to stop experimenting with things we use in our daily lives – chairs for example. The Cabbage Chair, which is also a part of the ‘Why Design Now’? exhibition in Cooper Hewitt is a good example of what I am trying to get at. It is a conceptual piece, an idea, an artifact, a thought. If designers loose that quality, then they loose their core. Designing for social good is the need of the hour and designers need to step up and do their bit. They need to be social activists, engineers, prototypers, policy makers but they also need to be artists. They need to push the envelope, think of alternatives that an engineer, a social scientist, or an end user just cannot. That is what makes us what we are. That’s how we do what we do. Social design is not a style, its a call to action. Respond to the it but have a vision. By the end of the day, the idea is to emerge as a designer, a damn good one too and not an aid worker.