context and all that

Michael Bierut, over at his blog:

All of this is compounded by the fact that designers themselves have very little faith in context. We too want the quick hit, the clever idea that will sell itself in the meeting and, even better, jump off the table in design competitions. More than anything, we want to proffer the promise of control: the control of communication, the control of meaning. To admit the truth — that so much is out of our hands — marginalizes our power to the point where it seems positively self-destructive.

This was in respect to graphic and logo design, but is true EVERYWHERE. Whenever we do a new architectural design studio project of a sufficiently large scale, I'm always wondering - will our well meaning intentions ever become reality (assuming we're designing in a hypothetically real situation and all that)? When we did inclusive housing last semester the open-endedness of this question was a GREAT frustration. Nothing exists in isolation, and we can't always predict how people will react, respond and adapt- even the greatest social scientists aren't always right. All the reading I've been doing for our seminar on complex adaptive social systems has merely reinforced this belief.

God, designers have to think through so many possibilities- and industrial designers and architects probably have it worst, considering the shear scale of their products their decisions affect a ginormous number of people. Shit.

you get the point, don't you?