Can Design Change The World?

Literally, design implies “development” or “construction.” Plan, scheme, entity, and visual creation, as well as some observable human interactions However, it does not end there. It entails a view of the generated things in terms of how they can treat and solve specific problems. Warren Berger, a journalist and poet, defines architecture as “a way of looking at the environment and the culture around us with the goal of improving.” According to Warren, architecture aims to overcome everyday life problems, so progress in this sense must still be constructive. Design is also force for change which goes far beyond just making things that are function and appeal to the eye and the sole.

Surrealism

Surrealism was a twentieth-century cultural movement that used visual designs and writing to work on achieving its goal of creating an absolute reality of the world. The Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 indicated that the primary aim of the movement was to design things that would not only unite dream and fantasy but also harmonize them into an absolute reality (Warren159). By attempting to blend the two realities of life and existence into an absolute one with the application of design as the core medium, surrealists are portraying design as something that can effectively change the world. The design below “This is not a pipe” by Magritte expresses the variance in perception between people. It goes far beyond the pictorial representation and the preformed opinion that this is a pipe and therefore coaxes critics to explore a more realistic meaning to it that can be constructive in solving problems. Because the image or the design below is instrumental in changing the perception of people, it changes the world.

René Magritte’s ”This is not a pipe.“ The Treachery of Images 1928–29, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Time magazine cover design below is an additional designs that have always been instrumental in changing the world.

Time magazine has reached the pinnacle of relevance, but it is still doing more to maintain. Its cover pages always contain designs that speak even better than all the content pages of the weakly draft that started in 1923. The design for various reasons acts and speak for this topic.

Works Cited

Warren, Saskia, and Stephen Forcer. ”11 The Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory.“ Public Art Encounters: Art, Space and Identity (2017): 159.