This year has seen a coalescing of crises unlike we’ve seen in recent memory. The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent economic collapse tested lives, hospital systems, and livelihoods. It has restructured the way we work, where we live, and the way cities operate. Then the end of May, after the death of George Floyd, a movement for racial justice spread across the United States—while the pandemic remained very much present. With the world at an inflection point, design’s ability to reenvision a world in crisis mode was put to the ultimate test.
That led Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the department of architecture & design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Alice Rawsthorn, a design critic and author based in the UK, to investigate design’s response with a series of interviews and curated content called Design Emergency. The series offers a hopeful, if somber, look at design’s unique ability to solve problems in a catastrophe. Though it started by analyzing the coronavirus pandemic, the series has expanded to look at other emergencies, like the recent explosion in Beirut, among others.
“Design is one of our most powerful tools in the COVID-19 crisis. The ingenuity, resourcefulness, and generosity of designers and their collaborators worldwide has produced innovations that are helping to protect us from the pandemic, to improve its treatment and to prepare for the radical changes it will introduce to our lives in the future,” they wrote in the their series announcement. The ultimate design optimists, Antonelli and Rawsthorn explore themes like hacking and collaboration and look at innovations big and small, from Song Dynasty-inspired hats designed to help Chinese school children visualize the six feet they needed to stay apart to the retrofitting of the Javitz Center in New York into a medical hospital by the New York District Army Corps of Engineers.
Fast Company: You and Alice Rawsthorn call your series, which explores design’s role during and after COVID-19, “Design emergency.” What makes designers uniquely capable of rapid response?
Paola Antonelli: Designers are trained to traditionally and classically solve problems. They’re almost like engineers of sorts. Then of course, they are also taught to solve [problems] with elegance. So when an emergency happens, they jump into action. They’re also trained to create teams. They don’t attempt to be biologists or environmentalists or chemists. They go and call in the team of experts that they need to get the job done.
FC: The pandemic, the racial justice movement, the economic collapse, the climate apocalypse: 2020 has forced us to reckon with the systems we are all a part of, and how we should change them. Can design really address any of these problems, or is it a Band-Aid? Hasn’t 2020 taught us that policy is everything?
PA: Design can have an effect in policy, but design cannot solve everything. No discipline can fix things alone (not even policy). What Alice and I decided was to try and show what design can do. We’re advocating the acknowledgement of the important role that design can play by trying to show to people how diverse design is, how much more than cute chairs and fast cars it is, how design can help, not only designers and corporations, but also citizens, politicians, and every human being reach their goals—especially if their goals are movement toward justice and more responsibility toward other humans, other species, and the environment. Design is a very powerful tool.