Niedderer, K., Clune, S., Ludden, G., 2018.

Design's intrinsic relationship with change and its challenges for the 21st century

Design has an intrinsic and powerful relationship with change. The change in production capabilities, promoted by design in form of products made desirable through advertising, promoted profound changes in worldview. Western and Western-influenced societies went from a culture of mending and reusing things to a throw-away culture, in part perhaps due to the emergence of non-recyclable plastics, but, more importantly, born out by the rise of consumerism. The consumerist approach connects design intrinsically to economic growth with enormous implications on all parts of human life including health and environmental sustainability. The capacity of designers to create change was subsequently most explicitly discussed by Simon in 1969, identifying that designers are engaged generally not in describing existing situations, but in transforming existing situations into preferred ones. In the field of product design, Desmet and Hekkert introduced the framework of product experience, known also as affective design or emotion design.