Designer existential crisis

Design so far has been considered a visual activity. Most books and magazines on design have been, at best, colourful catalogues or case studies with plenty of pictures. Designers always feel they are skilled, creative professionals who put their body, mind, and soul into the work they create. They leave the interpretation of their creation to someone else. They simply hide behind their work and say, with the usual aplomb, 'my work is my statement.'

What is now required is not a skilled designer, by skill I mean knowledge and aesthetic sense included, but a broad based, socially well integrated, humane designer with a broad global vision. The difficulty, deeply and painfully experienced, is the existential contradiction between the need for change and the loss caused by change. Design would then become a mission instead of what it is today, a commission.