As designers we enjoy figuring out new ways of interacting with the world around us. Clients often come to us with raw, just-invented technologies, and we help add a human perspective. New technologies prompt new forms, and we look for meaning in form. A product’s personality is the sum expression of the content it delivers, the function it performs, the behavior it elicits, and the aesthetic it portrays.
Imagine never having to look for a parking space ever again. Imagine that from here on out, this problem is solved. Fast-forward to 2025. You’re driving from Brooklyn to Manhattan...because driving in New York City, and everywhere else, has become much simpler a task than it was a decade or so before.
Or has it?
As Ralph Caplan defines it, "Design is a process for making things right." This definition captures the optimism of design, and it implies our fairly natural intuition about when a situation is “wrong” or broken.
In this TEDxSMU talk, frog Creative Director Kate Canales argues that design is something we come by quite naturally as humans. We design our way around broken systems everyday. The trick, of course, is to figure out how to apply that tendency to bigger and bigger issues.
This talk is about the little things Canales has seen that give her hope about our collective ability to design for those big problems. It is also about her belief that there will almost always be a thing in design, but the thing itself is not what matters. What matters is what the thing makes us do.
