A challenging economy is always good for design. It unites necessity and functionality. You are forced to be creative with poor materials.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The economy made me focus on designing more must-haves.
Design is not so much a design issue as a power struggle.
When you as a designer design something that burdens a community with maintenance and old world technology, basically failed developed world technology, then you will crush that community way beyond bad design; you'll destroy the economics of that community, and often the community socially is broken.
Design is a tool that either allows us to create new markets or disrupt existing ones.
Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities.
Good design is good business.
Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.
Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.
The best design work is really done when you spend more time with people, when you have the opportunity to be of the same mindset and the same incentives as the founder of the business.
It's easy to design expensive products. But there's that product democracy that I believe very strongly in to make something affordable for almost anybody that would want to use it.