Europe and American Design

Abstract

Design — the design of anything from a nut-and-bolt to a New Town for 100,000 people — is an art of the possible just as much as is the art of politics. Moreover, the failure of design in a physical product will become more immediately and painfully apparent than the failure of a policy or an alliance, so the designer’s work must involve as many known factors as possible. Designers therefore tend to work by example and to emulate successes: even when they claim high originality they are usually modest enough to admit that they stand upon the shoulders of other men; even when they aim by design to improve the condition of society, they must be able to point at other societies that have demonstrably benefited by designers’ work.