ABSTRACT
This chapter draws together the various threads that have discussed to show their interrelationships and to create an overall picture of the challenges facing design if it is to move in direction that is more substantive and life enhancing. People must constantly shift their focus back and forth between the pragmatic and the philosophical, the particular and the general, the local and the global. Linguistic description may offer insights, but is a complementary and necessarily sequential laying-out of issues rather than the immediate, holistic encounter one experiences when viewing a work of art or design. The chapter considers the relationship between doing and not doing, silence and words, in the context of design. The process of becoming 'educated' and working within the system frequently means becoming uprooted and, thereafter, being rootless. Constraints on the imagination are loosened in the arts – people are permitted, indeed they are required, to operate on impulse, and respond on impulse as a work develops.
