The importance of design in life

IT’S EASY to discount what good design can do for your life, but every aspect of design touches your life in some way. In the act of taking out your phone from your bag to opening an app while sipping water out of a thermos, design has already made an impact on your life. Years and months of planning have gone into the objects that you now hold in your hand.

And whether a design is good or bad can have a major impact on your life.

Rhea Matute, executive director of the Design Center of the Philippines, gives the example of a shoe: sure, we buy a shoe because it looks nice, but is it well-designed? A good shoe can make a difference for a life well-lived. In a bad pair, she says, “You can’t walk beyond 30 minutes, or you end up injuring yourself,” because a badly designed shoe can mess up your skeletal alignment.

Ms. Matute was speaking to BusinessWorld at the sidelines of the 2nd International Design Conference, an initiative by the Design Center of the Philippines, under the Department of Trade and Industry, which was held on Sept. 21 at SM Aura in Taguig.

“Depending on how you want that change to go, design is there. If you want to just stay on the superficial side, or do you really want to use design to change lives or to improve people,” said Ms. Matute.

Her fellow speaker Lenise Logan, Senior Art Advisor for Kalpa Art Coaching and Advisory, noted that every industry is impacted by design and creativity.

“It could be every single industry in the country. It could create new industries. That is what creativity is all about. It’s about removing limits to what’s possible.

“The Philippines has everything it needs” to be a design center and capital, she said. “It has the minds, the hearts, it has the talent, the know-how — it has the structure, to some degree,” Ms. Logas.

There lie the rub: “There is some value in reviewing what capacity the structure [has], not leaving, the talent that’s here.”

“What we’re trying to do in the Design Center is... instead of having disparate efforts, the DTI is also taking the lead to pull together the creative industries, and brand it as one,” said Ms. Matute. —