Can Design Save The World?

Every human being is a big fleshy vacuum cleaner, sucking up cultural debris and storing it in a sort of cranial repository, the mind’s dust-bag. We spend our time subconsciously mapping the empirical world and honing migratory impulses depending on what we’ve seen and where we’ve been. If design plays a role in shaping our world, then surely it has a part to play in changing our attitude towards it for the better. What is external to us is in that sense clearly, undeniably, crucial. Isn’t it?

I’m not so sure. What is ‘natural’ for human beings is just what’s natural this week, or this year, or this decade. Across the eastern hemisphere as well as in the good old U-S-of-A, a rather horrible little hobby occupies the sideways minds of many a God-fearing citizen. It’s called bonsai kittening – strange toothless men with dirty hands and a penchant for ventriloquism stuff newborn cats into transparent hourglass containers and watch them develop into funny ol’ shapes. Eventually the little brutes are corked out of their glassy homes and sold to yet weirder human beings. The point is – obviously – that kittens aren’t meant to be the same shape as an egg timer. They’re meant to be kitten-shaped, and spend their lives doing lovely kitten things like chasing ladybirds and what have you. It’s what’s natural to them (I know this because they talk to me).

It’s different with humans, though. What’s natural with us comes and goes. None of us want to be bottled and squashed either, but I think taking that possibility into question would stretch the credibility of this answer, which is already dangling by a thread. Our minds are not like the bodies of cats - although we are profoundly susceptible to manipulation from the outside, it is up to us what we do with all that junk once we’ve brought it in to our mental domicile. To return to the cat analogy (in which I suddenly have a renewed and fortified faith), if my cat brings a mouse to the door, it doesn’t make any difference how much I tell him off or feel sorry for the mouse. He’s a cat. It’s the same with buildings, for example. We have to stop blaming them. It’s the people on the inside that decide what the world is like, and that decision is strung together from recent trends, fully assimilated cultural prejudices, and utopian (or, in my nan’s case, apocalyptic) fantasies about possible futures. People can complain about the look of the block they live in if they like, but it’s up to them how they want to furnish the interior of their particular flat. Beyond that, it’s up to us all how we want to decorate the inside of our minds, and it’s how we do that job which will ultimately help change the world. In the process, we might be able to rescue some of those poor squished kittens.