Design was once seen as a tool to improve lives — but as modernism has become marketing, that sense of social purpose has drifted away.
Along the way design lost its ethical intent. It has retreated into protest and insularity rather than attempting to seriously address the big issues
The most prestigious design schools now concentrate on narrative, on storytelling — the product (that word too would be frowned upon) is less important than the process. The result is a strange situation in which young designers are situated between activism, performative gesture and a residual urge to create which is sublimated into something between journalism, installation, anthropology, sociology and superstition. A large part of design is now a critical field, producing provocations rather than necessarily solutions. It is aimed somewhere else.
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