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The power of design to shape understanding and belief
We are defined by our ability to use design to shape our understanding, beliefs, and how we see the world.
The myth of design: Fancy chairs
The role of design has many interpretations. When we say the word “design,” many images appear in people’s minds. A common one is that of an expensive, perhaps Italian, maybe reductive or ornamental, chair.
This interpretation of design is the most troubling and far from the truth: That design exists to produce products that are expensive, that are exclusive, that belong in a museum or a rich person’s house to be gazed at. I call this the Fancy Chair Myth, which narrows the purpose and role of design to something so extremely specific, ignoring the broader and much more significant way that design shapes our understanding, beliefs, and world. Apologies to these fancy chairs, as they are just innocent victims of how confused we can be about what design is.
The truth about design is it shapes our understanding of the world and our experience within it. What defines us as humans is our ability to design our world. Design is a man-made phenomenon eclipsing our natural environment. It is a veil we have created, reaching every aspect of our lives. How we wake up in the morning is designed through tools, technologies, furniture. As is the rest of our day—how we prioritize what’s important, how we communicate, how we work. Design informs whom we fall in love with, how we get the best deals on jeans, how we document sunsets. The impact of design extends from the physical world to how we understand ideas and what we identify with. It shapes how we understand our world, how we decide what is important, and, ultimately, what we believe in.
Design and understanding
We understand our world and the experiences within it through both logic and emotion: The curious mixture of the two creates individual meaning. Each of us responds to our own precise ratio of these two things, unique to our particular personalities. While many of us want to believe logic is the dominant lens through which we see the world, we are much more influenced by what we feel and what moves us — our…
