(Re)Cataloging Why Design Now?

Why Design Now?—presented through eight topical themes: Energy, Mobility, Community, Materials, Prosperity, Health, Communication, and Simplicity—could also have been presented utilizing deeper people- and environment-based themes. As a part of my review of the exhibition, I chose to recatalog and diagram the exhibition elements based on five themes that were strong undercurrents in the entire triennial: empathy, awareness, alternatives, empowerment, and authenticity. There is inevitably some overlap among these themes, just as there appears to be overlap between the existing topical categories around which the exhibition was focused, but I attempted to identify the overarching person- or environment-oriented tone to each work selected (and, of course, many environment-oriented works are person-oriented works at their core). This analysis was generated after taking notes on the exhibition as a whole, then reviewing my notes for commonalities, and assessing those commonalities to further define categories. Hence the category “Alternatives” came out of notes highlighting change, sustainability, renewable, and reuse; “Empowerment” came out of affordable [housing], self-sustainability, and responsibility; “Authenticity” came out of artisanal and preservation.

After reviewing the entire exhibition, I returned to the Communications portion to make my selections. Taking into account what I saw to be the deeper themes of the exhibition—empathy, awareness, alternatives, empowerment, and authenticity—I selected The Story of Stuff and The Girl Effect.

First, The Girl Effect. Using bold and compelling colors, drawn images and typography, the video introducing The Girl Effect campaign presents the theory that “investing in adolescent girls in the developing world offers the greatest opportunity for change for them, their families, and their communities.” This is a powerful call to the world to consider the often invisible members of distant societies; to think broadly and not fear taking on large problems; to consider human needs well into the future, and to imagine a future better than the one that would be predicted by the continuation of events as they currently proceed. The video, as well as the accompanying website, is clear, simple, educational, purposeful, and hopeful, and presents a theory and solution that is at once deceptively simple and strikingly huge.

The Story of Stuff also takes on a daunting issue (the future of our planet), and dissects it in a visually friendly and informative way. It is an animated lecture featuring environmental activist Annie Leonard, delivering a message about how products affect human society and the natural world as they make their way through the cycle of material extraction, manufacturing, consumption, and disposal. This video, and the conversation behind it, brings together all of the exhibition’s stated themes as well as its themes-beneath-the-themes, as I’ve established above. The story of how consumer goods are produced, packaged, marketed and then encouraged to be thrown away in order to be bought anew is one which draws from the categories of energy, community, materials, prosperity, health, simplicity and more.

Some might say that there is a progressive bias to the exhibition; i.e. if you didn’t believe that global warming is real and that our natural resources are dwindling, you would be frustrated that so much of the exhibition is devoted to alternatives—alternative energies, packaging, transportation, etcetera. Overall, as described by my secondary themes above, the exhibition is inclined toward representing achievements in sustainability—whether that means creating products from renewable or previous discarded resources, or whether it means creating tools and systems (improved water-gathering implements, cleaner-burning stoves, small-business informational support) to assist underserved populations in overcoming roadblocks to self-sustaining growth.

Why Design Now? The clear answer is that this moment is one of amazing opportunity for designers—not just to make new things or to create new identities but to fundamentally change the way that people live on this planet, how they consume its finite resources, and how they conceive of themselves and their brethren in the context of a swiftly growing global population.