Designers may not be able to save the world by themselves, but they must help avert societal problems and the looming climate crisis, says Christine Murray.

Designers, you know what your problem is" You just don't know when to stop. You just have to design bloody everything. You get a piece of city to masterplan and rethink every inch. But that's not what I call a city, that's a petri dish.
History is razed, weeds are sprayed, the graffiti washed, homeless spiked, teenagers dispersed by mosquito alarms, benches studded and chairs bolted to the ground, with selected humans inseminated into place.
Your belief in the supremacy of design and its "solutions" puts you in league with Doctor Frankenstein: the more you simulate life, the more monstrous your creation becomes. Your predisposition to impose design "solutions" on anything you touch alienates when it should include. You are not Midas; this is not gold. Your belief in the supremacy of design and its solutions puts you in league with Doctor Frankenstein
For a moment, we were with you. We held our iPhones and Muji toilet brushes and felt they made us better people ? before the screen-eyed loneliness set in, the plastic panic, the lagom and hygge backlash.
But now, through the likes of Greta Thunberg and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, we see your complicity in making ever more chairs, tearing out kitchens, building glass houses, concrete and consumption for consumption's sake.
This week a sick world swelt...