Design texts

A GOOD LONG TRADITION by Allan Chochinov

As much people love products, they love systems even more. Wearing a Nike+iPod Sport Kit fitness monitor, might increase the efectiveness of your workout, but the brand experience teachers you to a system of advertising, lifestyle and tribe making.
(...) Everybody loves to invent something.
(...)We are awed, charmed, intigued... and jealous all at the same time. ("Why didn't think of that?" it is the highest compliment we can bestow.)
(...) More than the simple marriage of form and function, Good Design manifests an economy of materials, a clarity of purpose, and a delight in use.
(...) There now seems an urgent mandate to design for good.
(...) When you are designing something expressly for social good, I'd submit, you have changed the bargain between producer and consumer; (...) product success or failure can no longer be driven and measured by market forces.
(...) Here the design versation moves from form, function, beauty, and ergonomics to accesibility, affordability, sustainability, and social worth.
(...) Alice Rawsthorn, writing recently in the International Herald Tribune, ponders: "Then there are all of the areas where design is deployed. Architecture. Engineering. Ghraphics. Multimedia. Information technology. Social Services. Disaster relief, and so on. How can (design) be expected to have coherente accross all them?"
(...) If designig is enjoying a renaissence un the bussiness press and in the public eye right now, then it is up to designers not only to welcome that new interest but also to leverage it into works of great, positive social change.
(...) I will carry aroud Design Revolution, for withn its covers lies and stunningly optimistic set of design initiatives, all aimed at the two objetives I hold most dear: solving problems and celebrating life.

Extract from the book: Design revolution : 100 products that are changing people's lives