Paola Antonelli is the design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and a two-time TEDTalks star, with her TED2007 talk “Treating design as art” and her EG’07 talk “Design and the elastic mind,” a preview to the 2008 MOMA show of the same name. Today, SEED magazine premieres her next venture, a monthly column. In the first one, called “Core Principles,” she lays out the challenge for designers right now:
Design today has to deal with a timely set of priorities and responsibilities: a concern for the environment, an evolved sense of responsibility toward other human beings, new technical advancements in manufacturing and distribution, new ideas about what constitutes privacy and ownership of things and spaces, the immateriality of new forms of design, the interactivity that many objects allow, and the resurgence of local cultures in response to the global market, to name just a few. Yet all design goes back to the same economy of goals and means, an economy that is also an ecology, and which could become the basis for a strong theory. Design is looking for a unified theory — or maybe just for a theory tout court — for, in spite of its permanence and inevitability, it is still a rather unexplored region of human creativity.