A hundred years of exploding consumer choice have pulled us apart, blinding us to the costs of what we consume, in the name of making that consumption easier. The problem now is how to design for individual happiness while aiming us all toward higher ends that we can’t accomplish on our own. We can no longer assume that a better world will come merely as a by-product of making more people comfortable. Whether the problem is climate change or fake news, design must now help us make decisions based not just on what’s easy to use, but on what we should be using in the first place.
