Design can’t solve all our problems

Editor-in-chief of The Developer, Christine Murray:

Designers, you know what your problem is? You just don’t know when to stop. You just have to design bloody everything. You get a piece of city to masterplan and rethink every inch. But that’s not what I call a city, that’s a petri dish.

History is razed, weeds are sprayed, the graffiti washed, homeless spiked, teenagers dispersed by mosquito alarms, benches studded and chairs bolted to the ground, with selected humans inseminated into place.

Your belief in the supremacy of design and its “solutions” puts you in league with Doctor Frankenstein: the more you simulate life, the more monstrous your creation becomes. Your predisposition to impose design “solutions” on anything you touch alienates when it should include. You are not Midas; this is not gold.

July 2, 2019