Ralph Caplan: By Design

Ralph Caplan’s short book starts off with an introduction saying that the book is for people who care too much about design. He follows this statement with another that reads “designers won’t save the world, but will make it worth saving”. The overall point of his book is to prove that design is important to most, if not all, human activities. The first time he truly understood the importance of design was when he was told a story about a small town theatre. The theatre, although segregation was illegal, had seats specifically for blacks in the back of the theatre. His refusal to change this caused students to rebel. A large amount of students bought tickets to a show and intermixed themselves through out the entire theatre. Seeing that some of the white customers were getting angry, he tried to order the black students to move to the back. He quickly noticed that the only way to do so was to cancel the show. Not wanting to lose money and upset everyone, he left it as it was. The next day he received a lot of praise because people thought he was standing up for equality. This caused business to be great so he never segregated the theatre again. This may seem irrelevant to the subject of design, but it is far from it. Design is a process of making things right and providing people with what they need. The manager of the theatre may not have had the intentions of doing so, but he did just that.