Escalante
Stewart Brand wrote the introduction to the Whole Earth Catalog and opened the first page of the first issue with these words,
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
It’s truer now than it’s ever been. We have an electronic model of Manhattan in a company of four people. We can make gadgets out of plastic and electronics and find the alternative to Big Product.
So I think, you know, we need macroscope ideas – like the tomato, like Spaceship Earth, like Dan Hill’s instrumented environment – because when the world changes, what we as designers create needs to change too, or it won’t be relevant.
Especially this year. The world has changed in bigger ways than we can really see or comprehend. The global financial system came close to complete collapse – the cleverest people by any measure or metric you can think of – the cleverest people in the world can’t tell us a cohesive story about the collapse of the banks. So what do we do? It’s too big.