designs does not solve

Yesterday I had a chance to read an English translation of an Italian design paper that discuses design as problem solving in approach; an idea  survived more than a century since Bauhaus and ülm.  After reading that usual stuff one always find on design,  it astonished me,  how ideas by sidestepping the time constraint contextual relevance of an argument, are turned into myths and thereafter anointed to unquestioned axioms in society.

Existence of an individual in a society evolves through one to one, one to many and many to many relationships and its prioritisation.  The need of human life and its problems arise out of this complex positioning, where individual and society are evolved as a complicated priority. 

Our life is constituted by Individuals  by acting as individual and society  simultaneously and  projecting one above the other  based on contextual necessity. History of human efforts proves that this complex relationship between ‘individual, society and priority’ actually mothers all human designs problems and ideas. Unfortunately this is a problematic terrain as  the one to one, one to many and many to many relationship  remain  a juxtaposed reality where one prioritisation imbalances the other two.

 Problem get many fold, as “many to many” relationship remain a completely indefinable constituent,  where individual can only be a subset to the totality.  In other words, prioritising one constituent over the other by addressing its issues with some possible solution will only culminated it into another problem because by then the other two components would have become inconsistent with the solution,  as the needs of each of the other two relationships and its objectives can be different,

For example “love” was one such design solution invented by humankind to tackle their problems of relationships and if one objectively analyses this design, one will find that the same solution also unleashes one of the  biggest problem in human life as well.  For instance take the examples of religion, society, community and relationship that are founded on the principles of love.  They unfortunately become the subject of segregation and separation in humanity. Despite so many   innovations and solutions have unfolded in human history, in reality our problems have only compounded or sustained .  In other words problem cannot be separated from any of these design solutions.

One pragmatic question arises out of this situation is that if such is the case, then how have the human society progressed as civilisation so far thousands of years?

 The simple answer may be that  it did not progress through solving problems but rather it progressed though a participatory evolution where problems are  contained a value addition.  It does not envisages to solve the problems as Design gospel “Design is a problem solving process" approach, rather as an effective design it evolves as a “value addition” in every problem to counter balance as evolutionary correction.

If one look around, none of our designs,  whether  it is  organic or constructed has ever solved any  problem of ours.  It has only brought a value addition to the existing system as an evolutionary necessity. Our entire contemporary designs, be it industrial or visual is a value additions to the existing system. They don’t solve problems, but they participate in the system to bring out "necessary" evolutionary modification- THE VALUE ADITION – THE DESIGN reiterating the point
"Design is not problem solving. Design is participatory evolution."