En av böckerna som jag läst i sommar (2014) är av en legendarisk designer, Viktor Papanek. I hans bok ”The Green Imperative” finns en inledning som handlar om The Power of Design. Läsvärt, tänkvärt och uppfordrande:

All design is goal-directed play. Only our questions change.

There is a sense of wonder, a feeling of completion in design that is lacking in many other fields. Designers have the chance to make something new, or to remake something so that it is better.

Design gives the deep satisfaction that comes only from carrying an idea all the way through to completion and actual performance.

Where does this element of joy come from? We have been called homo ludens, the playful being; certainly among the most profound human traits are curiosity and playfulness, and following from these a delight in learning from trial and error, in experimentation.

In design – this futures-oriented, trial-and-error process for making meaningful order – we work intellectually as well as from deep levels of intuition and feeling. In all human beings there are fundamental needs for comprehensible order, beauty, fitness simplicity, anticipatory thinking and playful innovation. Designers attempt to satisfy these longings through their work. 

The repertoire of a designer‘s skills talents include:

1. The ability to research, organize and innovate.
2. The capacity to develop appropriate answers to new or newly emerging problems.
3. The skill to test these answers through experimentation, computer modeling, working prototypes or real-word test runs.
4. The training to communicate such developments through drawings, models, mock-ups and feasibility studies, video or film, as well as through verbal, computer-generated or written reports.
5. The talent to combine form-giving with rigorous technical consideration and with sense if humane and social factors and aesthetic enchantment.
6. The wisdom to anticipate the environmental, ecological, economic, and political consequences of design intervention.
7. The ability to work with people from many different cultures and different disciplines.

(Citatet är något förkortad av mig)