Harvard Design Magazine #52: “Instruments of Service” Launch Party, Drinks & Discussion

At a moment when “design” has become everything—and hence nothing—issue 52 examines the hidden mechanics and visible output of design practice in order to track the shifting role of designers in society and to gauge the capacity of designers to effect change in a world of mounting crises. The issue poses a simple question: What do architects actually make and how is this changing?

Issue 52’s exploration is grounded in architecture. Once upon a time asserted to be the “mother art” (Frank Lloyd Wright) and as “the ultimate goal of all creative activity” (Walter Gropius’s introduction to his Bauhaus Manifesto), but over the past century it has lost its purchase on such sweeping and grandiose claims to creative primacy and world-building. At the same time, however, architecture remains a ubiquitous point of reference for a wide range of disciplines, practices, and protagonists that influence the design of the things we…