For The Atlantic, I wrote about how design became less about making objects beautiful and useful, and more about changing the world—with mixed results. It’s a review of the designer and educator Maggie Gram’s excellent new book, The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History. The book originally began as an n+1 article about how people have tried to use “design thinking” to solve all kinds of problems…including inescapably political ones, like economic and racial inequality.

I basically agree with Gram—and many other designers who are ambivalent about their chosen profession—that design alone can’t change the world. “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action.” But design can help, imo…it just requires a great deal of humility and collaboration.