What was design? Declarations and definitions from a century of creative questWhat was design? is a quick starter to one of modernitys most contested terms. In its brief but meteoric career, design was subject to vast controversy. Celebrated as an engine of change, denounced as a driving force of commercialization, and regularly lamented as overused, design remains a concept whose true meaning is still being sought. While answers to the question What is design? are constantly shifting, the time has come for a retrospective.