Controlled by Design
Design is often considered a luxury, yet the reality is that
nothing can be manufactured without first being designed. It can be as simple
as an envelope or pencil, or as complex as a car or space rocket. While some
designers such as Charles Eames, Milton Glaser, and Zaha Hadid, have become
household names, the vast majority of products we use every day are anonymously
designed down to the shape, colour and location of the tiniest screw on a
laptop. No one knows the name of the first craftsperson who designed the stucco
muqarnas of Nishapur, Iran in the 9th Century, a style that spread
across the Islamic world, or the very first woven paradise carpets or
illuminated Qurans.
Design is the purposeful fashioning of something, usually
products, architecture, or graphic design. It is also the design of systems,
from the structure of how a bank functions, education systems, government
structures or the design of roads to manage traffic flow. At a more subtle
level lies the design of policies that dictate the values of a society, spreading
across borders, through media, entertainment, literature, history writing, and
even fashion styles. What is newsworthy, what is funny, what is chic and what
gauche, who are the heroes and who the villains, is the result of perception
management by a number of economic, political or religious forces.
Design of systems can have a dark side. Shadowy private firms are engaged to
influence elections or markets, through sabotage, hacking or spreading disinformation.
Intelligence agencies plan elaborate subterfuge to infiltrate and manipulate
events. Conspiracy theories, a term first used in the late 19th
century, abound with hidden sinister aims, from the New World Order to genetic
altering via Covid vaccines.
Most of the time society unthinkingly adapts to whatever is on
offer. Concepts of urban planning were enthusiastically implemented, and then
questioned for their negative impact. Once building dams was the way forward,
now many are being dismantled. Countries were encouraged to industrialise, and
now its impact on the environment is at the forefront. Tablets are freely distributed to children to
encourage e-learning, but recently Australia banned social media for children
under the age of 16.
A 1941 cartoon by Peter Arno in the New Yorker, featured an
engineer walking away from a plane crash with the caption “Well, back to the
old drawing board.” The term was quickly picked up and is widely used when a
project or a policy fails requiring a fundamental rethink. While “back to
square one” has a sense of despair, “back to the drawing board” carries a sense
of determination to find a solution.
The term became reflective of post War USA foreign policy under
President Truman, fired up to reconfigure the world to suit US interests. This
included the creation of political blocs, the CIA, and the “with us or against
us” narrative. Julian Huxley shaped Unesco’s foundational philosophy of the
design of international collaboration in education, science, and culture, to create
a "world civilization" to counter nationalism. Mao Zedong radically changed
the structure of China, the world’s most populous nation in 1948.
These were all in the nature of giant experiments, with
constant design adjustment as policies sometimes failed to achieve intended
aims. The Post War world was first divided into developed and underdeveloped
nations, then first, second or third world, then replaced with the less judgmental
North or South description, which also makes little geographical sense.
Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, recently protested “we
are not an experiment, a testing ground for others' ideas”. Administrative
systems that evolved over time in the empires of China, India or the Middle
East, were displaced by European models, once alien and now adopted in the
interest of global connectivity.
While people need structure and a set of values for the
smooth functioning of societies, the complexity of societies today makes it
difficult to design these through consensus. Dominant political and economic
forces are, instead, allowed to determine the narratives.
HR consultant, Jason
Teoh, writes that far too many face “exclusion by design” as spaces and systems
keep leaving people out. There needs to
be “a fundamental shift in who we centre when we build policies, tools, spaces,
and services.”
Durriya Kazi
December 12,
2025
Karachi
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