ABSTRACT
Since the Arts and Crafts movement, and certainly since the Bauhaus, the designer has often been popularly represented as a mythic fi gure, a creator with almost godlike powers to improve environments, beautify homes, and make people happier. In short, designers have been represented as forces for social good. This reputation, however, came under attack from the 1950s onwards, when those in the emergent consumer rights and environmental movements charged designers with being in thrall to market researchers and advertisers, and of fueling wanton consumerism and waste ( Penner 2013 ; Twemlow 2009 ). And faced with the rise of the “designer-celebrity” in the 1980s, design historians, infl uenced by theories of feminism and Marxism, sought to stress the strict social and material limits within which designers operated and to which they were also subject ( Sparke 2014: 211 ). 1
Yet today the idea of the designer as a powerful agent of social good has roared back to life in certain quarters, if anything stronger than ever. Within management and business circles and in the works of popular writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Warren Berger, the designer has become the main proponent of what is called “design thinking”—a problem-solver par excellence who can provide solutions to any knotty dilemma, including the world’s most urgent social issues. As Berger argues in his book Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the World , “design is really a way of looking at the world with an eye towards changing it” ( Berger 2009: 3 ). He calls designers like Bruce Mau and Yves Béhar, two of the main examples in his book, “fi x-the-world” designers, spearheading “a new way of thinking about design” (ibid.: 3-4) .
