What a world-spanning miracle a successful design is.

A successful design has successful engineering. Myriad components (physical and logical) are assembled into an elaborate system that functions together in concert as a unit.

But a successful design has more than just successful engineering. Design focuses on human responses to engineered things. Where an engineered system works objectively, building objects out of objects, design concerns itself with subjects in relation to objects. Subjective beings experience, respond to and interact with engineered objects, and, in their participation, complete the design. Design instaurates hybrid systems of subjective participants and objective parts.

But human beings are not solitary. Human beings are profoundly social. For one thing humans swim in shared linguistic meaning. Our heads are full of words. Words enter through our ears, words spill out through our mouths, words swirl about in thoughts, inner dialogue, imagination, poetic inbursts, looping self-talk, babbling. But our environments are overflowing with signs, signals, symbols, meanings, most of which were molded by and for human minds, hearts and hands. Most of what we see around us is only heard and read, but the best of it reaches through the words and touches or strikes our hearts. Our hearts. First person plural. We share our loves, concerns, cares and cultivate, protect, honor, repair them together. When we lose these things we let the world around us deteriorate and decay. We might even want to help it along. A successful design gives us a shared object, inspires shared concern, draws us together, condenses us around common love, gives us shared being with whom, in whom we identify. Without common objects of love, identity devolves into mere typology, classification systems, schema, categories, criteria, reified imaginary constructions.

But best of all, successful design requires us to leave the insular certainty of our own expertise and mastery. Design demands that we let go of what we know and how we know it, so we can expand our understanding to accommodate how truth and reality is given to others. We must, again and again, pry apart the grasping fingers of our all-knowing minds, force open our own comprehensive omniscience, and expose our tender palms to what is not yet graspable. To “open the hand of thought” is not a gentle release. It is a terrifying sacrifice, entailing the loss of everything our hand death-grips as its own possession.

Only in this opened state does our hand momentarily apprehend the incomprehensible vast richness of being, and it does so by allowing itself to be held in its openness. Vanishingly few can allow this at all, and almost none of us can do it for long — but this unfolding of comprehension is the one thing needful for inspired, inspiring design work.

And this is why the world is overflowing with unwanted garbage, forged in the closed fists and hard skulls of technical masters of design — experts in convincing heard-headed executives to build useful things, spray-painted with desirability, calculated to achieve measurable business goals. These design experts might complete many successful projects, but they do no successful design, and so, despite their best intentions, whatever they construct drains yet more love and care from the world.