Found at “Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world” on 2025-10-06T10:40:19+02:00.

The product is less important than the process.

The most prestigious design schools now concentrate on narrative, on storytelling — the product (that word too would be frowned upon) is less important than the process. The result is a strange situation in which young designers are situated between activism, performative gesture and a residual urge to create which is sublimated into something between journalism, installation, anthropology, sociology and superstition. A large part of design is now a critical field, producing provocations rather than necessarily solutions. It is aimed somewhere else.

Designers become brands.

(…) the most famous designers do all they can to become brands in their own right. It is not their products which are the end result of their labours but themselves. (…) Big-name designers greedily accept commissions for huge, empty installations which aspire to the condition of art but end up more like experiential branding.

Walter Gropius house, © Getty Images. This house in Dessau, Germany, is an icon of Bauhaus design. It was on the original article to show an example of what good design looks like.