We have been asked to present issues, trends, phenomena and events in technology, culture, politics and economics that impact design's future. This is of course a quintessentially post modern assignment in the sense that it assumes that the designer incorporates all of these factors into their work. From this premise, the designer as incorporator, it is easy to arrive at the hypothesis that design in the daily world is necessarily fragmented into as many different trends and directions as there are economies, social phenomenon and points of view. This relativity is explained as either positive or negative and certainly it presents a challenge to any designer that seeks to focus their work. For the designer, focus belies, if not contradicts, the plurality of things as they are.

As an architect and city designer (I use the term city design as opposed to urban design to denote a preference for the specifics of place rather than the theory of planning) my work exists in this plural condition where it is defined as both product and contentious politics. Architecture in the city is always built politics. Additionally, architecture is perhaps different than some of the other design professions that equally confront post-modern pluralism because of its relationship to time and shelter. While architecture is used in the sense that an industrially designed product is used, and it does, like graphic design, benefit from incorporating an appreciation for the ephemeral, both social and technological, architecture, because of its inherent relationship to time and shelter resists to a greater degree than these other disciplines currents of consumerism and theming. The easiest way to describe this is to point out that architecture is continuously adjusted by the city and land that evolves about it and has a continuos potential for change of use over time. In this sense one could argue that architecture is more radically effected and influenced by politics than the other design professions. This latter point defines an area of opportunity that I believe opens a window onto the future of design, as an activity of individuals, an educational endeavor, and a means of change.

Let me turn for a moment to Modernism which still defines the standard framework for professional practice. Modernism is marked by its capacity to organize and rationalize the world into principles and strategies reflective of the moment. The resulting modern world is the world of the overview where people, governments and public and private institutions develop strategies to control and manipulate situations. To succeed in the twentieth century is to project a world view and in part this drive to world views can be traced in the Western world back to the Renaissance of perspective and the enlightenment of individual liberty when ways were devised to shift the responsibility of the overview from God to man. In essence, people learned to see life and the world from the outside to the inside and this point of view has dominated life, particularly in the 20th Century, and as a consequence design since. In the 20th century, in the realm of architecture, this trend is easy to identify. From the radiant urbanism of Le Corbusier to the new towns of Andres Duaney, architects have devised strategies to overcome the dilemmas and tensions of the pluralist City. While there is an important parallel history of architects and others who have resisted this point of view and sought to change the parameters of architectural ideology, the fact remains that the strategic overview that assumes that an individual can absorb the trends of the age and translate them into a ideal and controlling design view of value to the world to this day dominates architecture, architectural discourse and architectural education. This brings me back full circle to the relativity of this millennial moment versus the continued belief by most designers in the relevance of the controlling and modernist overview. One way of summing up this condition is to simply note the tension between the outside overview of any problem, the tendency to reduce problems to idealisms and essentialisms versus the inside realities of the conditions that generate issues in the first place.

I believe that the modernist view of the world from the outside in is no longer relevant and therefor design has to change. Increasingly the forces that matter are not those that theorize the world from the outside to the inside but those that act upon the world from the inside to the outside. Architecture has perhaps been affected by this change more than the other design disciplines because of its consequent immersion in the political, but it remains at its core just as uncomfortable with the nascent results as the other design arts. By changing one1s point of view can one imagine a design world charged to work from the inside out? How does design act from within the daily? How does design respond to increasing democratization? Who controls content and meaning? How do you educate a designer to address these issues and therefor work from the inside to the outside?

Working from the inside to the outside in many ways is a natural aspect of design for designing demands attention to the detail and craft of making in the context of the social, economic, cultural and technological aspects of a problem. From the inside of a problem the visual is always supplemented by a more complex understanding of the relationship of the means to the realities of the problem. Knowledge in design is produced through making as well as thinking and it is this former aspect that needs increasing attention in curricula and as well as real world situations. In the 20th century too much of design and the discourse of design has emphasized its visual, theoretical and formal end results rather than its processes. Much of theory has unintentionally reduced the design product to an end result that is given a fixed meaning. The history as well as the experience of architecture and design through time defies this type of fixity.

Taking on the view point of the inside to the outside clarifies the position of certain present preoccupations suggests new pathways to follow. For instance:

Ada Louise Huxtable is outside,
J.B. Jackson is inside;

both/and, either/or and dialectical are outside,
these and those are inside;

New Urbanism is outside,
consensus city design is inside;

mass transit is outside,
automobility is inside;

theory Is outside,
making and craft, i.e. design is inside;

classicism is outside,
collage is inside;

the expert view is outside,
collaboration is inside;

Universal City Walk is outside,
Hollywood Boulevard is inside;

globalism is outside,
sustainability is inside;

and strategies are outside,
tactics are inside.

One could go on and on and no doubt the argument is rough. Nevertheless I feel that we are at the beginning of a great wave of opportunity for designers, but only if we de-emphasize our skill at strategizing problems, seeing them from the outside in, and rely instead on what is in the nature of design and craft. We make things through time in response to conditions as they are and as people working together decide they should be. I am optimistic that looking at the world from the inside out allows us to transcend the theoretical shackle of design as interpretation of the world and as it increasingly democratizes, to become better contributors to daily life though the contribution of our work.

If you wish to distribute or reprint this essay, it must include the following credit line.
© 1997 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com