设计是如何解决一切问题的?

The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’
作者:Celine Nguyen    发布时间:2025-07-04 15:00:47    浏览次数:0
On the first day of a required class for freshman design majors at Carnegie Mellon, my professor stood in front of a lecture hall of earnest, nervous undergraduates and asked, “Who here thinks that design can change the world?” Several hands shot up, including mine. After a few seconds of silence, he advanced to the next slide of his presentation: a poster by the designer Frank Chimero that read, Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck.
在卡内基·梅隆(Carnegie Mellon)的新生设计专业班的必要课程的第一天,我的教授站在认真,紧张的本科生的讲座大厅前,问道:“这里谁认为设计可以改变世界?”包括我在内的几只手向上射击。沉默了几秒钟后,他晋升为演讲的下一个幻灯片:设计师弗兰克·奇梅罗(Frank Chimero)的海报阅读,设计不会拯救世界。在汤厨房里去志愿者,你自负的他妈的。

My professor wasn’t the first person to deliver such discouraging news. In 1971, the design educator Victor Papanek began his best-selling book, Design for the Real World, with a similar message. “There are professions more harmful than industrial design,” he wrote, but “very few.” By designing and popularizing products that “pollute the air we breathe”—including cars, which are responsible for “murder on a mass-production basis”—he argued, “designers have become a dangerous breed.” But design was capable of inflicting such harm, he wrote, only because it had so much potential, and therefore also the capacity for immense good. For Papanek, it was “the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environment (and, by extension, society and himself).”
我的教授不是第一个传达这种令人沮丧的消息的人。1971年,设计师Victor Papanek开始了他最畅销的书《现实世界的设计》,并发出了类似的信息。他写道:“有危害的职业比工业设计更有危害,但很少。”通过设计和普及的产品“污染我们呼吸的空气”,包括造成“大规模生产基础谋杀”的汽车 - 设计师已成为危险品种。”他写道,但是设计能够造成这种伤害,仅仅是因为它具有很大的潜力,因此也具有巨大的善良能力。对于Papanek来说,这是“人类塑造他的工具和环境(以及扩展的社会和他本人)的最强大工具。”

Many working designers today echo Papanek’s ambivalence about the profession. In her fascinating, rigorously researched new book, The Invention of Design, the designer and educator Maggie Gram shows how the field transcended its humble origins as the mere art of decoration and became a more ambitious, and more conflicted, discipline. Designers are responsible for more things than ever before: hardware, software, services, infrastructure. Many designers aren’t just trying to beautify the world; they want to make it a better place. In the process, they have tackled societal issues such as racial injustice and economic inequality, with mixed results. Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can’t; the history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference. Gram’s book is critical of the hubris and techno-optimism that have led design thinking astray, but it is also hopeful, imagining how the discipline might eventually live up to its stated ideals.
如今,许多工作设计师回应了Papanek对该行业的矛盾情绪。设计师和教育家玛吉·格拉姆(Maggie Gram)在她迷人,严格研究的新书《设计的发明》中展示了该领域如何超越其谦虚的起源,因为它仅仅是装饰艺术,并变得更加雄心勃勃,更加矛盾。设计师比以往任何时候都多:硬件,软件,服务,基础架构。许多设计师不仅试图美化世界。他们想让它成为一个更好的地方。在此过程中,他们解决了社会问题,例如种族不公正和经济不平等,结果不同。当它知道它可以实现和无法实现的目标时,设计效果最好;设计的历史充满了未能有所作为的乌托邦项目。Gram的书批评了使设计误入歧途的傲慢和技术自动主义,但也充满希望,想象该学科最终如何辜负其既定的理想。

In the 19th century, designers were typically commercial artists who worked to make everyday objects more attractive to consumers. But Gram’s book shows how, over the course of the 20th century, practitioners such as Eva Zeisel helped shape a new way of thinking about the profession. Born in 1906 to a highly educated Hungarian Jewish family, Zeisel became, at 18, the youngest woman to join the potters’ guild of Budapest. Her first job was to make prototypes of pots to be mass-produced at a factory—a skill that brought her to Berlin and then the Soviet Union. But her career there was cut short by Stalin’s Great Purge, and Zeisel moved to New York in 1938, where she taught at the Pratt Institute and designed dinnerware that was exhibited and sold at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work married Old World craftsmanship with industrial-manufacturing practices, and showed that popular modernist styles, which were often seen as rigid and circumscribed, could be executed with what Zeisel called “real elegance.”
在19世纪,设计师通常是商业艺术家,他们努力使日常物品对消费者更具吸引力。但是Gram的书展示了在20世纪的整个过程中,诸如Eva Zeisel等从业者如何帮助塑造了一种新的思考该职业的方式。蔡司生于1906年,是一个受过良好教育的匈牙利犹太人家庭的,他是18岁,是加入布达佩斯陶艺家协会的最年轻的女人。她的第一份工作是制作一家工厂大量生产的花盆原型,这项技能将她带到了柏林,然后是苏联。但是她的职业生涯被斯大林的《大清除》缩短了,蔡司于1938年移居纽约,在那里她在普拉特学院任教,并设计了在现代艺术博物馆展出和出售的餐具。她的作品将旧世界的工艺与工业制造实践结合在一起,并表明,经常被视为僵化和限制的流行现代主义风格可以用Zeisel所说的“真正的优雅”来执行。

Zeisel was one of many European émigrés who shaped American design culture. In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art school where first-year students were given a foundation in color, form, and fundamental aesthetic principles. The school was initially funded by the German state of Thuringia, but when the government began shifting to the right in the 1920s, the Bauhaus had to find a different business model. It began to partner with companies to sell its own products, which made the curriculum more explicitly pre-professional. As Gram writes, the Bauhaus began “using machines to mass-produce objects that worked,” including chairs, lamps, and other household items.
Zeisel是塑造美国设计文化的众多欧洲移民之一。1919年,德国建筑师沃尔特·格罗普斯(Walter Gropius)创立了Staatliches Bauhaus,这是一所艺术学校,在该学校中,一年级学生获得了颜色,形式和基本美学原理的基础。这所学校最初是由德国的图林基国家资助的,但是当政府在1920年代开始向右转移时,包豪斯必须找到不同的商业模式。它开始与公司合作销售自己的产品,这使课程更加明确。正如Gram所写的那样,包豪斯开始“使用机器来批量生产有效的物体”,包括椅子,灯和其他家居用品。

Read: How design thinking became a buzzword at school
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When the school eventually closed and Gropius fled Nazi Germany for America, he brought the Bauhaus’s ideas to Harvard’s design school as a professor. Gropius’s approach to industrial design—epitomized by the famous dictum “Form follows function”—was enormously influential; the Bauhaus’s synthesis of art, technology, and practicality shaped America’s understanding of design over the following decades. In a 2003 interview, Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, remarked that “most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.” But, as he argued, “it’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
当学校最终关闭时,格罗普乌斯(Gropius)逃离了纳粹德国(Nazi Derman)前往美国时,他将包豪斯的想法带到了哈佛大学的设计学校。格罗普乌斯(Gropius)的工业设计方法是由著名的格言“遵循功能”所表明的,具有极大的影响力。包豪斯(Bauhaus)对艺术,技术和实用性的综合塑造了美国对设计的理解。在2003年的一次采访中,当时的苹果公司首席执行官史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)表示:“大多数人犯了思考设计的错误是它的样子。”但是,正如他所说,“这不仅是它的外观和感觉。设计是其工作原理。”

Jobs’s reframing marked the culmination of a decades-long cultural shift. By the end of the 20th century, design students were typically categorized into one of two buckets: industrial designers who made physical, mass-produced products, and graphic designers who communicated information with visuals. But following the rapid rise of the technology sector during the early 21st century, many design students gravitated toward careers in that industry, where they worked on intangible products such as interfaces and software systems. As Gram writes, designers need more than just craftsmanship skills; they should “be students of human culture.” Here, the field benefited from another kind of émigré: social scientists who, faced with a declining academic-job market, entered the tech industry instead.
乔布斯的重新构图标志着数十年的文化转变的高潮。到20世纪末,设计专业的学生通常被归类为两个水桶之一:生产物理,批量生产产品的工业设计师以及与视觉效果传达信息的图形设计师。但是,在21世纪初期技术领域的迅速增长之后,许多设计专业的学生倾向于该行业的职业,在那里他们从事无形产品(例如接口和软件系统)的工作。正如Gram所写的,设计师不仅需要工艺技巧。他们应该“成为人类文化的学生”。在这里,该领域受益于另一种移民:社会科学家,他们面对一个学术界下降的市场,而是进入了科技行业。

One contributor was Lucy Suchman, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984 with a Ph.D. in anthropology, then took a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center as a researcher. In an influential study, Suchman placed two successful computer scientists in a room to see whether they could, as Gram writes, use “a brand-new, feature-rich Xerox photocopier” without issues. They couldn’t. It turned out, as Gram observes dryly, that learning how to use an unfamiliar machine “is never as simple as technologists want it to be.” Other tech companies also hired social scientists, who became a new kind of design professional: user researchers. In theory, they were meant to instill a more “human-centered” approach to technology. In practice, however, they were pressured to solve problems quickly and prioritize profit over the ideal experience.
露西·塞曼(Lucy Suchman)是一位撰稿人,他于1984年从加州大学伯克利分校(UC Berkeley)毕业。在人类学上,随后在施乐的帕洛阿尔托研究中心担任研究员。在一项有影响力的研究中,Suchman将两名成功的计算机科学家放在一个房间里,以查看他们是否可以使用“崭新的,功能丰富的Xerox摄影师”而没有问题。他们不能。正如Gram干燥地观察到的那样,事实证明,学习如何使用陌生的机器“从来没有像技术人员想要的那样简单。”其他科技公司还雇用了社会科学家,他们成为了一种新型的设计专业人士:用户研究人员。从理论上讲,它们是为了灌输一种更加“以人为本”的技术方法。但是,实际上,他们被迫快速解决问题,并优先考虑利润而不是理想的体验。

Eventually, some designers and design educators grew to feel that the “problems worth solving,” as Gram writes, were the “wicked problems” of society—a term coined by the design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 to include issues such as crumbling public infrastructure, education inequality, and poverty. Teachers encouraged their students to apply design to things that really mattered—not just the creation of mass-produced consumer goods. And companies such as Ideo, a design consultancy founded in 1991 in Palo Alto, helped turn design from a specialist skill into a general-purpose one, selling the concept of “design thinking” to corporate America.
最终,一些设计师和设计教育者逐渐感到,正如Gram所写的那样,“值得解决的问题”是社会的“邪恶问题” - 设计理论家Horst Rittel和Melvin Webber在1973年创造了一个术语,其中包括诸如崩溃的公共基础设施,教育不平等和贫困等问题。老师鼓励他们的学生将设计应用于真正重要的事物,而不仅仅是创建大规模生产的消费品。IDEO等公司(1991年在帕洛阿尔托(Palo Alto)成立的设计咨询公司)将设计从专业技能转变为通用技术,将“设计思维”的概念卖给了美国公司。

Design thinking, as Ideo’s CEO, Tim Brown, wrote in 2008, “uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible.” While Ideo employed design thinking to invent user-friendly insulin pens and an updated PalmPilot, the company also suggested that its approach to identifying issues and brainstorming solutions could be applied to all kinds of problems—including the “wicked” ones plaguing corporations, educational institutions, health care, and government. Corporate America fell in love with the idea, and Gram describes how design thinking became an almost “spiritual movement,” with Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design, as its bible. Its influence extended around the world: In 2006, an advertising agency in Bogotá, Colombia, was asked by the government to research, prototype, and launch an ad campaign imploring a group of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla fighters to demobilize.
作为IDEO的首席执行官蒂姆·布朗(Tim Brown)在2008年写道,“设计思维的设计思维”“使用设计师的敏感性和方法将人们的需求与技术上可行的东西相匹配。”尽管IDEO采用设计思考来发明用户友好的胰岛素笔和更新的棕榈杆,但该公司还建议将其识别问题和集思广益解决方案的方法应用于各种问题,包括“邪恶的”陷入困境的公司,教育机构,保健机构,政府和政府。美国公司爱上了这个想法,Gram描述了设计思维如何变成了几乎“精神运动”,布朗的2009年书《 Change by Design》是圣经。它的影响力扩大了世界:2006年,政府要求在哥伦比亚波哥大的一家广告代理机构研究,原型和发起广告活动,恳求一群马克思列宁主义者游击队战斗人员撤消。

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But design thinking often disappointed its disciples. Take Gram’s example of Gainesville, Florida, where in the 2010s, about a third of the city’s residents lived below the poverty line. In 2013, the city’s mayor asked Anthony Lyons, the director of a newly formed economic-development committee, to turn the city’s prospects around. Lyons looked to Silicon Valley for inspiration and hired Ideo for a two-month, $200,000 project to research how Gainesville could become a more “competitive” city. Lyons soon became city manager, and quickly implemented Ideo’s suggestions—including creating a new logo, establishing trainings for city employees in design thinking, and renaming the Department of Planning and Development the Department of Doing.
但是设计思想常常使其门徒失望。以格拉姆(Gram)的例子为佛罗里达州的盖恩斯维尔(Gainesville),在2010年代,该市约三分之一的居民生活在贫困线以下。2013年,该市市长要求新成立的经济发展委员会主任安东尼·里昂斯(Anthony Lyons)扭转了该市的前景。里昂(Lyons)寻求硅谷寻求灵感,并聘请了IDEO进行了为期两个月,20万美元的项目,以研究盖恩斯维尔(Gainesville)如何成为一个更加“竞争”的城市。里昂很快就成为城市经理,并迅速实施了IDEO的建议 - 包括创建新徽标,为城市员工建立设计思维的培训,并重命名计划和发展部。

These sorts of changes, Gram writes, had a “tenuous relationship” to the real challenges facing Gainesville, one of the most racially unequal places in the country. Black residents had lower high-school-graduation rates and higher unemployment rates than white residents, and Ideo’s more surface-level solutions could do little to address that reality. Lyons’s eagerness to redesign Gainesville to be “the most user friendly city in the world,” as Ideo advocated, ignored the expertise of existing city employees. There was low morale and high turnover, and when Lyons himself resigned after a few years, a resident told a local university’s newspaper, “Gainesville is not a Silicon Valley startup.” The trouble, as The Gainesville Sun’s editorial board wrote, was that Lyons, despite being an “agent of change” in the city, failed to “build consensus.” He didn’t have a design problem to solve; he had a political problem.
Gram写道,这些变化与盖恩斯维尔面临的真正挑战是“脆弱的关系”,盖恩斯维尔是该国最不平等的地方之一。与白人居民相比,黑人居民的高中生率较低,失业率较高,而IDEO的表面水平更高的解决方案无济于事。正如IDEO所提倡的那样,里昂渴望重新设计盖恩斯维尔成为“世界上最友好的城市”,忽略了现有城市员工的专业知识。士气低落和流动率很高,几年里,里昂本人辞职时,一位居民告诉当地大学的报纸:“盖恩斯维尔不是硅谷初创公司。”正如盖恩斯维尔·孙(Gainesville Sun)的编辑委员会写道的那样,麻烦的是,里昂(Lyons)尽管是城市中的“变革的代理人”,但未能“建立共识”。他没有设计问题要解决。他有一个政治问题。

The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an “extraordinary career.” No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, “design is one of the terms that has replaced the word ‘revolution’!” That might be the problem. “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.” But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what’s profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work.
正如法国哲学家布鲁诺·拉图尔(Bruno Latour)在2008年演讲中所观察到的那样,设计的概念具有“非凡的职业”。设计使物体更美丽和有用的设计不再是设计;相反,他建议:“设计是取代'革命'一词的术语之一!”那可能是问题。Gram写道:“我们当代的设计思想通常被用来说服自己:“没有政治和政府行动,就可以实现积极的社会变革;解决问题的解决可能既可以是生成和有利可图的。”但是,在社会层面上,大多数雄心勃勃的变化都需要政治共识,而对某些人来说,盈利可能并不是所有人。设计可能会分散真正的工作。

The solution, though, isn’t to stop trying to change the world. What could a more beautiful, user-friendly, accessible, and egalitarian society look like? When it comes to making the world a better place, Gram writes, “design can contribute to that project, and it should.” In 2000, the designer Sylvia Harris helped revise the U.S. census to be more accessible and comprehensible, leading to a 2 percent higher participation rate compared with the 1990 census. This meant that more Americans, especially those from marginalized and undercounted communities, were represented. In her work, Harris exemplified a different path for the profession: one that seeks to understand the needs of the community being served and emphasizes participatory design. Designers’ instincts for aesthetics, utility, and usability can play a crucial role in addressing society’s “wicked problems.” But they can’t solve them alone.
但是,解决方案并不是要停止尝试改变世界。一个更美丽,用户友好,易于访问和平等的社会会是什么样?Gram写道:“设计可以为该项目做出贡献,而且应该为世界做出贡献。”在2000年,设计师西尔维亚·哈里斯(Sylvia Harris)帮助修改了美国人口普查更容易及其可及,与1990年的人口普查相比,参与率更高2%。这意味着更多的美国人,尤其是那些来自边缘化和低估社区的美国人。在她的工作中,哈里斯(Harris)为这一行业提供了不同的途径:试图了解所服务社区需求并强调参与式设计的人。设计师在美学,实用性和可用性方面的本能在解决社会的“邪恶问题”方面起着至关重要的作用。但是他们不能独自解决他们。

Illustration Sources: Pixelimage / Getty; KTSDesign / Getty; J Studios / Getty.
插图来源:像素图 /盖蒂;ktsdesign / getty;J Studios / Getty。

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