All the same, design can be the place where art converges with ethics, as it does in some of the work by the people profiled here, the first of 100 in a new series on the world's most innovative people.
With them, determined imagination has rescued ruined landscapes or built housing for refugees. Design can also be the point where art meets science—some of these creative characters use computers the way another generation used pencils.
In the end, design can even be the place where art and commerce both meet metaphysics. It is, after all, mostly by the sum of what designers produce that we understand ourselves to be living in a particular time. Nature is so slow to change that we can hardly grasp the flow of things. It is the world we manufacture that shows us how time passes. "Then" was when things looked that way. Now is when they look this way. Here are people making that way go this way.
