While I’m not normally one to use other people’s content in a blog post, I can’t help but share with you some really interesting thoughts on the current state of Industrial Design as evoked by Allan Chochinov over at online design mag Core77.

Chochinov recently wrote 1,000 words on the critical dichotomies of design (also the title of the piece) for Core77′s Apocalypse 2012 series (yea, I know, the series makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it…) Below are a few snipets from his article, which you can find in full here.

A really interesting read that will definitely make you think, and maybe even ask yourself a few questions. It certainly made me wonder about design philosophies. I particularly enjoy the last snippet in the list I’ve included below. There’s no arguing money is important, but as you’ll read, an increasing awareness in what else is important is occuring, which is really exciting for designers and those who use their designs alike.

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“We are at a moment in history when, as designers, we are at our most powerful. There is almost nothing we cannot make, enjoying the triumphs of research and development in materials science, manufacturing technology, and information systems. We can get any answer we seek through social networks, peer communities, or hired guns. We have sub-specialties at unimaginably thin slices of expertise—from ubiquitous computing to synthetic biology—and a plumbing system in the Internet that is simultaneously unprecedented in human history and entirely taken for granted.”

“At the same time, unbelievably, we have never been in worse shape: We are witnessing the collapse of every natural system on earth. Take your pick—on the ground we’ve got clear-cutting, desertification and agricultural run-off. Underneath we’ve got fracking and groundwater contamination. In the air, greenhouse gasses; in the oceans, ice sheet melting, acidification and Pacific trash vortices; in space we have the ghastly and ultimately impossible problem of space debris (we won’t beable to leave even when we’re ready to, and nobody will be able to get into help us if they wanted to). We carry body-burdens of toxic chemicals leached and outgassed from our homes, our cars, our food packaging. The consequences of industrialization metastasize out to slave factory labor, massive river diversions, obesity, malnutrition, gender inequality, rampant poverty, minefields. We tax our economies with war machinery instead of fueling healthcare and education provision. We feel helpless on the one end and hopeless on the other.”

“We need to acknowledge the fact that this time, and our place in it, are truly remarkable: We are equipped with our most powerful tools, right when the world needs us most. This is an astounding proposition for design.”

“In the old design model, we had ‘problems’ and we had ‘solutions.’ A designer’s job was to take a problem—a brief, a market need, a new technology looking for an embodiment—and to solve it: Here’s the problem; here’s a solution. Next problem please.”

“We are now recognizing that this worldview is unbearably naïve and not a little arrogant; that problems are not static, they’re dynamic. They are moving, organic and fundamentally systemic. You might say that they aren’t even “problems” at all; they are “problem spaces”—a term progressive designers have been using for years. But I’d argue that you don’t “solve” problem spaces, you negotiate them. And that this negotiation requires new kinds of processes, fluencies and participants. This is the new design practice that is emerging all around us: it’s inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary; it is tactical; it concerns itself with things like resiliency and sharing ecologies, and pays as much attention to meaning as to money. And it explores entirely new kinds of currency and value—currencies like participation, and reputation, and access, and happiness.”