As often happens, a couple of postings on other web sites make for an interesting comparison. The postings concern how disabled or non-standard people have been accommodated in the built environment.
Barry Katz, professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, has written a book that, at 200 pages, conveys a worthy and instructive history of consumer design as it has applied and evolved in the famous Silicon Valley.
The book has two objectives, to survey the development of the design business in the Valley and to explain the development of Design as a professional discipline, one with its own particular knowledge and methods. In both respects, the book is a great success.
The theme of CSTV's Design & Society course is "good design". When I ask students what this expression means, they tend to think, first of all, about technical matters, e.g., efficiency, cost, usability, and so on. However, as the course progresses, we come to ethical issues, e.g., is the design "good" for people, and in what sense?
Although the ethical aspect of good design has always been important, it is becoming ever more immediate. I think this is because fewer designs today are simply objects while more are really services.