Massive Change

I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, visiting Raincoast, our super-cool Canadian distributor, where I stumbled on an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery called "Massive Change." It was a show about design, how our era will forever be remembered not for certain politicians or wars or events like 9/11, but for the massive design changes that have occurred over the past few decades and continue today. These innovations are so large and pervasive, in fact, that they are invisible to most of us. We take them for granted. Some, like television or the internet, are more obvious than others, like containerized shipping or vertical urban growth, but together they constitute an astounding transformation in human life. We live in ways our great grandparents would have trouble comprehending if they could visit us in a time machine (whereas they would see relatively little change traveling back in time from their own era).

Anyway, here's the website, if you're interested:

www.massivechange.com

An underlying affirmation in all of this is that we, as designers (which all humans are, by nature), can change the world, solve problems, make things better, as much or more than any politician or clergy or movie star or terrorist or athlete. We should remember that design (or invention or innovation or however else you want to put it) can be one of the great forces of good. Design could be considered a higher calling!