Design, The Future and the Human Spirit

...designers have to seek autonomy and use it, if possible, for socially and environmentally productive ends. They must confront a world that is becoming increasingly polarized: wealth versus poverty; fundamentalist religion versus secular humanism; environmental sustainability versus ecological destruction; and technological utopianism versus technological resistance. To position one's self among these and other oppositional forces requires an intensive reflection on one's own values, goals and social concerns. It also calls for an operational strategy to align one's self with other social actors and institutions, whose concerns are compatible with one's own.

by Victor Margolin
Design Issues: Volume 23, Number 3, Summer 2007