What was design?

What was design? – Declarations and definitions from a century of creative quest is a quick starter to one of modernity’s most contested terms. In its brief but meteoric career, “design” was subject to vast controversy. Celebrated as an engine of change, denounced as a driving force of commercialization, and regularly lamented as overused, design remains a concept whose true meaning is still being sought. While answers to the question “What is design?” are constantly shifting, the time has come for a retrospective. This book looks back, presenting a century of design thinking in its most compact form: a collection of bold quotes.

What was design? Declarations and definitions from a century of creative quest pits 87 historical one-sentence answers from practitioners, theorists, and philosophers against one another. The result is a web of radical short-form definitions that remain strikingly contradictory in their references. This selection is accompanied by an essay from Florian Walzel, exploring the deeper reasons behind the conceptual ambiguity of design.

Slanted Publishers is an internationally active publishing and media house founded by Lars Harmsen and Julia Kahl. They publish the award-winning print magazine Slanted, covering international developments in design and culture twice a year as well as other design-related projects and publications in the field of typography, contemporary art, and design.