In the spring of 2024, I stood in a civic futures gallery watching visitors circle a small grey object on a plinth. The object did nothing — no interface, no affordance, no promise. Yet the questions it provoked, about energy, about care, about what we owe to the non-human, filled the room more completely than any product launch I have witnessed.
The Narrowing of Imagination
A 2013 catalogue for Four Civic Provinces opened with an observation that has only grown sharper: design's fixation on fixing things has impoverished its imagination. When every brief demands a solution, only those futures that can be rendered as functional products get explored. The rest — the messy, unresolved, ambivalent futures — go unexamined. This is not a failure of technique but of nerve.
The most interesting things design can do have nothing to do with solving. They have to do with seeing.
This is not an argument against usefulness. It is an argument for a broader definition of what design is for — one that includes asking questions the present cannot yet answer, mapping territories that do not yet exist, and refusing the tidy resolution.