Part 1. The Power of Design

A New Definition of Design

Throughout the 20th century, designers developed their craft within the walls of a professional ghetto. Designer Ralph Caplan once complained that he and his colleagues were considered “exotic menials” by the captains of industry. While this was partly due to the dominance of spreadsheet thinking in business, it was helped along by the success of the German Bauhaus, in which the designer’s mission was a matter of infusing industrial artifacts with the sensibilities of Modernist art. You can imagine the seductive pull of this vision on generations of designers who entered the profession, not through business schools or even design schools, but through art schools.

Thus, our shared understanding ...

Get The Designful Company now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.