On Social Design

From Massive Change by Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries

For most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails.

In fact, the secret ambition of design is to become invisible, to be taken up into the culture, absorbed into the background. The highest order of success in design is to achieve ubiquity, to become banal.

Most of the time, we live our lives within these invisible systems, blissfully unaware of the artificial life, the intensely designed infrastructures that support them.

Accidents, disasters, crises. When systems fail we become temporarily conscious of the extraordinary force and power of design, and the effects that it generates. Every accident provides a brief moment of awareness of real life, what is actually happening and our dependence on the underlying systems of design.

...Massive Change is not about the world of design; it's about the design of the world.

And from The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery.