When I was young, the word design (imported to French from English) meant no more than what we now call “relooking” in French (a good English word that, unfortunately, does not exist in English). To “relook” means to give a new and better “look” or shape to something – a chair, a knife, a car, a package, a lamp, an interior – which would otherwise remain too clumsy, too severe or too bared if it were left only to its naked function. “Design” in this old and limited meaning was a way to redress the efficient but somewhat boring emphasis of engineers and commercial staff. Design occurred by adding a veneer of form to their creations, some superficial feature that could make a difference in taste and fashion. Even if design could be greatly admired, it was always taken as one branch of an alternative: look not only at the function, but also at the design. This dichotomy was true even though the best design was one that, in good modernist fashion (as it did in “functionalism”), approximated function as closely as possible. “Design” was always taken in this “not only… but also” balance. It was as if there were really two very different ways of grasping an object: one through its intrinsic materiality, the other through its more aesthetic or “symbolic” aspects.

I know this is a very poor rendering of what is now meant by “design”. (I am well aware that the French use of the word is much more restricted than the Scandinavian or the English one). However, I want to utilise this definition from my youth as a base line from which to fathom the extraordinary career of this term. From a surface feature in the hands of a not-so-serious-profession that added features in the purview of much-more-serious-professionals (engineers, scientists, accountants), design has been spreading continuously so that it increasingly matters to the very substance of production. What is more, design has been extended from the details of daily objects to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and, as I will argue, to nature itself – which is in great need of being re-designed. It is as though the meaning of the word has grown in what logicians refer to as ‘comprehension’ and ‘extension’.