Future Here Now: The Dangers of Design

Reprise

This article ran more than a year ago, but I’ve been encountering more and more situations where this is exactly what’s happening. And I’m inclined to conclude that some corners of the design world are actually resisting the increasing pressure to do more inclusive design.

That might be due to client-pleasing (a whole ‘nother problem), or it might be due to the fact that meaningfully including people in your design process who are not like you is…. scary. Intimidating. Unfamiliar.

Creating a process - and a product - that the designers can’t control .

That might be one of the deepest challenges facing the design professions: collaborating necessitates giving up some control. And that issue goes deeper than design methods or AutoCAD skills or crits.

It goes to what it means to be a professional working on designs that will profoundly impact lots of people who aren’t like you. And what it means to work with a community, instead of for.

Come to think of it, a lot of us face that dilemna, in lots of lines of work. And in an era where information is near-frictionless, where minorites are finally finding their way to the center of the conversations, and where people of all walks of life increasingly expect their unique indivitual voices to be heard and valued…

not addressing that challenge adequately could put us, with all our degrees and letters, on the sidelines of the work that matters.

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I don’t usually comment on urban design issues — I’m definitely not a design thinker — but this article gets at some of the core issues that I think lead to dysfuntional public spaces. It’s not the best written piece, but the examples are valuable and the author’s framing is useful.

The author’s premise is that