Who has not heard, in economic, political or social contexts, of the virtues of the famous “added value”? According to our macroeconomic strategists, this is the life raft of our business activity, in the same way as the equally famous R&D is held up as the panacea for the ills of an increasingly globalised world.

For years, we designers have been vindicating our role in society. We have always stood in the shade of other prestigious, consolidated professions like architecture or engineering. We have even felt a certain inferiority complex towards them, and we have attempted to walk in their footsteps in search of our “lost recognition” by creating high-level qualifications, professional associations, standardised fees and so on. And yet, oddly enough, and coinciding with our country’s economic take-off, we have discovered that one of its potentials is design – and, as almost always happens, the term then suffers an abusive and disproportionate use to the point that the “designer” tag becomes a synonym of trivialisation. Design schools fill up, shops and shows proliferate, prizes and distinctions multiply … and the result is a society where design inundates everything – both good and bad design, it goes without saying.

What most concerns me is that, in the face of this apparent social ubiquity of design, the designers, public institutions and various economic circles continue to persist in defining design as “added value.” To speak of added value is to speak of something that enriches, but the term “added” means that it is something ancillary. To define design as added value is to trivialise it, to consider it not as something basic but as a feature that enhances the worth of the product. Would we talk about architecture as an “added value” in our towns and cities? Can we call a doctor an “added value” of the health service? Of course not. Architecture is a value in itself, as is medicine. Why does design have to be seen as something “added”? Defining ourselves in this way means relegating ourselves to a secondary role, a role in which design will only come into the spotlight when the economic cycle is robust enough to take it into consideration. The rest of the time, design is dispensable.

Good design must become an essential value. Good design permeates society spontaneously, often anonymously and without paraphernalia. It becomes vital, essential for the society that uses it, whether in the form of a typeface or a chair.

When we refer to design as an added value, we are focussing solely on the aspect of profitability, ignoring its social value.

It is clear to see that we designers, and the institutions that represent us, have fallen into the trap of an unconscious use of the term “added value.”

What happens with design, with good design, is that it becomes what in medicine is the autonomic nervous system: in a nutshell, it operates without having any apparent consciousness, automatically, like the heart or the kidneys. And we only become aware of its existence when it suddenly goes missing. In the same way as we only realise how vital a kidney is when it fails, we only appreciate the importance of design when it doesn’t work, when, for instance, an airport has no direction signs, a chair is impossible to sit on or a book is illegible. If we take it for granted that a signposting system has to be infallible, a chair comfortable or a publication intelligible, then we cannot talk about design as an added value: we have to talk about it as a value in itself.

It may now be time for all of us to search for other ways of asserting our presence in a society that is already complex enough without having to assimilate still more “added values.” Design will be essential, or it will not be.