Society influences designers, design processes and designed objects
Society influences designers, design processes and designed objects and establishes the context that repeatedly stimulates changes in design’s direction. Only when these social parameters have been grasped can theory, science and practice employ highly deliberate planning and design not only to interpret and comment on society but also to influence it in the best sense. Design reflects society in all its facets and forms. Designers take positions on the mental states, including anxiety, indifference and euphoria, problems, and desires of social groups.
They plan and work out interpretations of society in the form of trivial or ingenious products, media and systems by giving them functions and meanings. Designers do not act autonomously in that process but as part of a society, subject to its influences. Designed objects are social messages. The unique variety of products today speaks to societies that are increasingly organized for individuality and consumption, and filled with contradictory ideologies and social antinomies.
Light, transportable, and highly technical everyday objects that facilitate contact and allow access to globally networked communication technologies at the touch of a button testify to the mobile rapidity of modern, media-dependent lifestyles. Furnishing components suited to quick assembly and disassembly simplify transient living and working situations. Products are made up of modules so that they can always seem fresh and individually customizable.
Comfortable, cozy worlds for living and health respond to living circumstances that are perceived as transitory, mechanized, and raw. Order becomes increasingly significant in the face of complexity. What, how and where to store stuff the solutions to such problems fill entire trade fairgrounds. Urban public spaces are increasingly impoverished and satisfy few social needs apart from those of consumption. Open spaces give way to shopping malls; vending machines and flat screens entice us to spend quickly. Human services are replaced by multilingual avatars customers are asked to serve themselves and have fun doing it. Design can be viewed from two sides in this context.
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On the one hand, it seems that designers work in order to arouse new desires, to generate trends, and thus ultimately serve a society that is understood and accepted as highly focused on consumption. On the other hand, design is in a position to do much more than arouse and satisfy consumer demand, because design can also be understood as a planned process (Design Process) that responds to social questions and injustices with logic, reason and clarity. By focusing its energies on production and sales while neglecting to address the need for a solid socio-theoretical substructure, design as a discipline has been stuck for years in a crisis of positioning and meaning.
In order to regain social relevance, there has to be an effort to establish a design theory that addresses economic, social and cultural considerations and also identifies and addresses the weaknesses and failures of design in those contexts. The concept of a social order is based on social categorizations on the basis of certain identifications like age, gender, class, ethnic origin and sexual orientation. The hierarchies inherent to such classifications are evident in the ways in which designs are created, marketed, and consumed by and for the communities that comprise them.
For example, in Western societies, where life expectancies are getting longer, designs that capitalize on the widespread obsession with youth have become increasingly desirable. Likewise, products are almost always gendered, whether consciously or unconsciously, through the use of coded forms, colors, sizes, materials and so on. The use of “feminized” products by those ranked higher in the social hierarchy (men) is, generally speaking, associated with a loss of social respect Precisely because these markers of identity are to a large extent socially constructed, designers must necessarily consider the implications that their decisions will have on the perpetuation or reversal of these cultural stereotypes.
Design for men, design for women, design for young people and design for old people such designations can only be accurate if there are genuinely different needs that should be taken into account in the design process, independent of purely symbolic assessments. Designs can have powerful social repercussions, both positive and negative, but this is not yet well established in the awareness of many designers. One reason for this is the legitimizing of social orders by value systems such as religion, culture, ethnocentrism, and government that normalize the hierarchical social structures of communities. The given models of thinking about themes like the distribution of power, hygiene, beauty, family, or sexuality essentially determine which designed objects are acceptable, what they can look like, who will use them, and how.
Questioning learned normalities is a fundamental technique in design, but it does not always enable us to surpass the limitations of our own socialized perceptions. Compensating for this very human deficit is reason enough to develop the emerging discipline of design science, and to encourage an awareness of the varied relationships between designers, their objects and the use of those objects that would be useful for the development of both theory and practice.
The process of design has always been dependent on value-laden decisions; every designer needs to constantly revisit and address the ways in which their personal ideologies are compatible with prevailing social circumstances, whether they are artistically, economically, or sociopolitically motivated. Some designers choose to reinforce the existing social order by adopting a strictly market-oriented approach, while others take it to the other extreme through methods like protest design and critical design.
Yet others focus their attention on improving accessibility for disadvantaged social groups, like those with disabilities (Universal Design). Thus, socially responsible designs simultaneously take account of the contexts in which they are created, and draw notice to the fact that the majority of design processes overlook or discount the needs of underserved communities. Numerous organizations have emerged that attempt to rectify or alleviate social inequities, often with innovative and far-reaching results.
One Laptop per Child, a project designed to develop and distribute cheap functional laptops for children in developing nations, was effective in highlighting the need for better global educational resources, to be sure but on top of that, it was also an exciting innovation in technology, with ramifications that extended far beyond the original contexts of use. As a result of this project, manufacturers in developed and industrial nations have also begun investigating the possibilities inherent in the creation of simple, functional, high-performance laptops with power supplies that work independently of electrical networks. Those designers who are socially aware perceive the world critically, imagine how it can be, and point the way to the future of design.