I APPROACHED this compact, inexpensive paperback with low expectations. It left me exhilarated by its breadth of philosophical debate, though still sceptical that the global design industry can deliver its promise of perpetually improving on what we have already. Or if it can, what cost will be entailed to the environment – and whom in the global community will these products benefit?

Design for the 21st Century surveys 45 successful product designers from Europe, Japan and the US. There are all the usual suspects, including Philippe Starck, Marc Newson, Ron Arad, James Irvine and Ross Lovegrove, and many others who were unfamiliar to me. Each of the designers was asked to provide a brief “vision statement” about the future of design, accompanied by three pages with images of that designer’s recent products. It is the ferment of ideas and speculative philosophical positions within these vision statements that provides the book’s intellectual substance and lifts it above the promotional hype and uncritical enthusiasm that appears to be standard fare for design books.

In their introduction, the editors do a workmanlike job of pulling together thematic strands and areas of tension, although a more sceptical stance would have been appropriate. In my view, they place relatively too much weight on the positive potential of design, coupled with technology, to respond to human needs and make the world a better place, compared to consideration of the obverse, namely homogenising tendencies of global corporations to flood the world with expensive, unnecessary goods that further drain limited resources and eradicate cultural differentiation.

Awareness of these tensions between idealism and economic pragmatism is present as an implied critique amongst designers featured, many of whom are conscious of the limitations of their power to exert influence in using design for the betterment of humanity.

Starck encapsulates the critical issue for design futures in his comment that “Today the problem is not to produce more, so that you can sell more. The fundamental question is that of the product’s right to exist”. He continues that the most difficult thing for a designer is to refuse to do anything, especially if the product already exists. No doubt the mega-successful Starck can afford to be discerning. However, I wondered about the “right to exist” of his bizarre four-headed TeddyBearBand toy design in the accompanying image. If ever there was a decadent toy for the pampered wealthy child who has everything, that teddy was it. British designer James Irvine expresses restrained qualms about where design is headed in his comment, “Always question why you are doing something, unless you are being paid a ridiculous amount of money, then really question it”. His Ostra City Bus for Mercedes Benz was among the minority of designer products that were aimed at improving life for the wider community, not just the privileged few. A related viewpoint is expressed by Milanese designer Stefano Giovannoni, who perceives the need for new products as being driven by marketing departments of large companies that use designers to “anticipate the new and increasingly sophisticated fictional architecture of our desires”. While his Magicbunny toothpick holder for Alessi is all about the transcendence of a desire for status over utility, the Bombo swivel bar chair for Magis successfully combines functional performance with stream-lined allure.

London-based designer Sam Hecht states that “design continues to face a dilemma when determining what portion of a product should be developed to be chosen in the shop, and what portion should be developed to be used”. He advocates a simplifying of form “... with its roots in the ordinary”. Hecht’s designs include an elegantly utilitarian Soft Wrist phone for ElekSen and the Post-it email watch for Seiko. Several designers expressed frustration at their dependence on client corporations who provide a buffer between the designer and consumers, with a consequent shift to design driven by sales imperatives rather than needs. Design-to-order via the web is one strategy that attempts to bypass the dominance of large corporations. Youthful Japanese firm Elephant Design receive advance orders for their limited-run (100 units) custom-designed computer, fax and cell phone.

Caution about the future of design is predominantly from well-established designers with substantial design practices. Among the younger, up-and-coming designers, there is an infectious buzz of positive, high-energy excitement about the potential of new materials and technologies to accelerate design processes, improve existing products and to better cater to changing 21st century lifestyles.

Many designers make innovative applications of remarkable new materials, including shape-memory alloys, light-emitting plastics and foamed metals. Berlin-based Werner Aisslinger sees new products responding to a design aesthetic that is “utilitarian, organic, reduced, soft, purist, poetic, modular and nomadic”. His alluring Soft chaises lounges for Zanoota and Soft Cell chairs utilise new lightweight, translucent synthetic materials.

Ross Lovegrove speculates that as the accelerating pace of technological innovation blurs boundaries and creates a “soup-like freedom” there will be a return to the “enduring beauty of the organic” and to design based on “deep, primordial resonances”. From New York, Karim Rashid postulates that objects should enhance our enjoyment of life through their utility and beauty, which he conceives as not being about taste but inseparable from the experience of using the object.

Starck, however, espouses replacing beauty “.. which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept”. Others share his concern for a humanistic design that transcends superficial aesthetics of appearance. Veteran Italian designer Alberto Meda calls for technology to be tamed and for rejection of market driven goods that “... have no regard for human needs”. His compatriot, Enzo Mari takes this a step further and concludes that “... ethics must guide all design”.

To achieve affordable, beautiful, utilitarian, sustainable, economically-viable product, design is a big ask. Despite the absorbing urgency of the philosophical positions in Design for the 21st Century, it was sobering to realise that of all the products featured, the only pieces I could afford were an Oral B toothbrush and an inflatable egg cup.