Design is, in many ways, the prototypical interdisciplinary field. It encompasses art and architecture, engineering and aesthetics. Good designers dabble equally and alternately in education, politics, marketing, technology, cognitive science, and ethics—among innumerable other specialties. Included in this cacophony of fields is philosophy, which has proven a particularly fertile area of inquiry for designers.
Designers have studied epistemologists and phenomenologists, historicists and social theorists. Names such as Baudrillard and Bachelard and Habermas and Foucault are well known among designers—and all have been used to great effect. Perhaps the single greatest result of such philosophic inquiry is the recognition of desire as a core human feeling.
Though designers are as yet far from perfecting it, they've begun to discover precise paths to desire. Desire is part of design's parlance and is the ultimate goal of any whiteboard begging to be filled. Hence the appearance of such products as the iPod, which anticipates the need it fills, satisfying change even as it creates the need for change.
As design approaches perfection of the fulfillment of desire, it needs to look forward to other human feelings, needs, or impulses. After all, if everything is designed to satisfy all of our desires—which are, by definition, a product of a loss or absence—is there an absence left to fill? Therefore, the design field needs to look toward a field of inquiry different than philosophy, yet one akin to it.
I argue that design needs to look to religion for its next stage of thought evolution.
It's safe to say that design is a fundamental and pervasive quality of human existence, one that affects us even as we control it. As the design researcher John Heskett writes in Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life:
Design is one of the basic characteristics of what it is to be human, and an essential determinant of the quality of human life. It affects everyone in every detail of every aspect of what they do throughout each day. As such, it matters profoundly. Very few aspects of the material environment are incapable of improvement in some significant way by greater attention being paid to their design. (p4)
Heskett goes on to point out that design is a product of choice, that its process is an iterative cycle in which human decisions are the only constant and dominant influence at every stage. To design is to decide.
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