The design of prosperity : beauty, happiness and hope

Abstract

It is possible, in my view, to draw an analogy between the desirable future of design and the desirable future of humanity. It is possible, in other words, to read the title of this conference, "the design of the future", in the two senses of the genitive, to mean both the future of design and the project of designing the future. In the first use the subject of the discussion would be design and its future; in the second it would be the future of humanity, or of the world, and the possibility or otherwise of planning or designing it. In the same way one can use the phrase "the gift of love" to mean either the object being offered as a demonstration of one's love (as when one gives a rose or a precious stone as a gift), or that love itself is being offered as a gift. The claim I'd like to make is that the qualities that characterize the best design are the same as those that mark what we should think of as a desirable future for humanity and the world. The qualities of good design, which I will soon mention, are those same qualities we'd like to associate with the kind of world we'd like to live in, if at all possible. The dream-design is the dream-world. Or that's what we would like to believe.