Enormous segments of the world population are addressed by design. This fact gives the design experience, taken in its entirety, a new social dimension. Against the background of the opportunity to fine-tune designs to each individual without the need to build on expected literacy, the responsibility of such an activity is probably unprecedented. Whether designers are aware of it, and able to work within the boundaries of such an experience, is a different question.
The new designer
Designs mediate between requirements resulting from human practical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them as affordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations and plans for change; and they need to interface between the given and the desired or the expected. The language of design has an implicit set of anticipations and a projected endurance. Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologically supported, affects the efficiency of designed items. The explicit set of expectations is measured against this implicit set of anticipations. It translates from the many languages of human practical experiences to the language of design, and from here to the ways and means of embodying design in a product, event, message, material, or interaction.
It is interesting to consider the process of designing from as many perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to the many variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating the other, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a natural selection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so on until a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is the memetic scheme, successfully translated into design software programs based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules, such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualistic thinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores a continuum of answers to questions that arise during the design process. The fact that various solutions compete with each other confers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects a sense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of its engaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between the design experience within a context of assuming identity between the body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning of the human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, robotic prosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged from any other pragmatic context but the one on which the civilization of illiteracy is established.
Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Temple typewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlessly designed and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would be difficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting an ideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made it unavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behind or inside the word processor, as behind any digital processing machine, are standardized components. The entire machine is a highly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for all the word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells and whistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability to achieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that raw materials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind, applied to tasks relevant to human experiences of self-constitution, makes something out of them.
In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a challenging sense of quality against the background of our obsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so much the activity as the people who are the activity that make either the criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This brings up the identity of the designer in the civilization of illiteracy.
Designers master certain parts of the vast realm of the visual. Some are exquisite in visualizing language: type designers, graphic artists, bookmakers; others, in realizing 3-dimensional space either as product designers, architects, or engineers. Some see design dynamically-clothes live the life of the wearer; gardens change from season to season, year to year; toys are played with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima). The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlled by design principles. There is integrity to design, consistence and pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyone would like to study design in its generality, the first lesson would be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design, and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacy operates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics are given in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way, from the particular context to new answers, continuously adding to a body of experience that seems inexhaustible.
People expect their environment to be designed (clothes, shoes, furniture, jewelry, perfume, home interiors, games, landscape) in order to harmonize with their own design. There are models, just as in the design process, mainly celebrities, themselves designed for public consumption. And there is the attempt to live life as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism, communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle of designed education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries, promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estate execution, and wars. As a designed practical experience involving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient, but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the same time. The conclusion applies to the result of all design activities-products, materials, events. They make possible new levels of convenience, but they also remove some of the challenges people face and through which human personality emerges.
The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meeting higher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personality is quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses new aspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspects over time and is projected, together with biological and cultural characteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters of new situations, and consequently new people. The civilization of illiteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average, generating expectations affordable to everyone. The space of choices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest for novelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of the extraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (including his or her name) in the designed product, material, or event. Nobody ever cared to know who designed the Walkman, computers, earth stations, or new materials, or who designs designer jeans, dresses, glasses, and sneakers, tour packages, and Olympic games. No one even cares who designs Web sites, regardless of whether they attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips. Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition value alone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind the name as long as the name trades well on the market in which the very same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for glasses, sells under different identifiers.
This has to be seen in the broader picture of the general disconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who their neighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people are who namelessly participate in expected abundance or in ecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away with the opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the means through which new practical experiences take place make each of us subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is even deeper integration of the individual in the shared databank of information through which our profile of commercial democracy is drawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time we step out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, to buy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to search for information on the Internet-we become more and more transparent, more and more part of the public domain. But transparency, sometimes savage in competitive life (economy, politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As we celebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what is lost in the process.