DOES DESIGN MATTER?

I can't remember the day I first decided to become a designer. It probably goes back to my early teenagehood, a time when I was thrilled by the wittiness of some tv or outdoor ads. As ironically as it is (more on that later), I wanted to become an advertiser.

Although I was affraid - as I have always been - of not being able to fulfill the needs of a business that required a constant dig for good ideas nearly every day, I was sure that I wanted to jump into that adventure. So, it happened. What I never expected was a total shift of mindset on the reasons why that career mattered. By the time of my high school years, advertising became, to me, the most despicable way of designing. As I kept on reading about design, I learned that it should accomplish something big, much bigger than trying to persuade people to buy something through an impactful message.

Hence I started to see design as a tool for helping people. To me, it should follow a design-methodology, starting by identifying a problem and later on working to solve it. Optimistically thinking, that would always be the aim of the designer.

During my student's years, despite being aware of this main focus of my future profession, my biggest goal was to achieve beauty in my works. By drowning in books and websites for "design inspiration", I became overwhelmed by how someone could create such innovative and astonishing visuals. "I want to do that!", "How did they come up with this idea?", "Oh my god, I will never be this good", and a thousand mixed sensations in my head that made me feel goodly bad, happily sad, lightly smashed. Design was certainly leading my emotions, in a way that I wished my designs would one day lead other people's.

The years passed and I kept on searching for more and more design inspiration. It became an obsession - suddenly I had more websites to follow daily than I could conciliate with my daily schedule. Withal, this overload of meaningless decontextualised images slowly made me realise that most creative work was being made just to be out there - for the beauty of existing. It seemed like, in general, design was losing its core goal and turning to itself. I started seeing this "designing design" as a negative escape from the discipline, being no more than a self-centered, vain and selfish approach to something that should be working for the good of the community.

After this great disappointment on the overall unsatisfactory style of designing, something else came up that is making me question whether design actually matters. Lately, the awareness about the sick planet we live in has been showing up more than ever. Air and seas pollution, global warming, increasing world-population - it seems like we're reaching a peak when all those issues are no longer to be ignored. More and more campaigns are trying to create global acknowledgment of the turning point we are at. It is now or never.

My question is: in a world falling apart, where capitalism puts its financial interests before the planet's, what is the role of design? While trying to find a new job, all I can find is ads for design agencies eager to make profit by selling their products at any cost. In a realistic commerce perspective, graphic design is used to feed a cycle of consumerism - either by showing off products or "beautifully" dressing companies with appealing logos and websites. What can you do in design that will really make a meaningful change at a global scale while still giving you money enough to live? 

I still don't have any answers but I am looking for them. When I first chose design, I thought it was one thing; quickly that definition turned out as a disappointment but I found a better one for it. Right now, I am trying to unveil the lane design should follow in order to keep on making itself useful. The old ones don't fit anymore.