Personally, I love having my stupidity handed to me on a silver platter every now and again. It feels good when it happens often, because I figure it must mean I'm learning something and it leaves me with the choice to either laugh about it and continue on, or stand there and cry for a while at the expense of blurring my own vision. I keep trying to choose the former, since it helps to see if you want to move forward.

Anyway, it happened again. Not that I wasn't really aware of this, but I'd never seen it put forth so well, before. But I'll get to that.
First, the premise: As a graphic design student, I've been doing some reconsidering of what my priorities are and how I will be able to contribute to both myself and the world, or at least my immediate vicinity/community/audience.

For myself, I need the spiritual stimulation that comes with fine art as well as the monetary stimulation that is a byproduct of practical, commercial work. I thought being a designer would be a perfect way to mix the these, and then be able to give something meaningful and helpful to an earth that desperately needs it. I don't know what that third thing is yet, but I'm hoping to figure it out soonish.
Unfortunately, being a designer often isn't really as glamorous or righteous or easy as that. I knew this already, even just from freelancing for a few years (Sometimes you want to give people telephones, but they just want a lobster. That kind of thing.) but it became even more apparent here in art school, and in real-world jobs. Lately I just find myself wanting to learn/read/study much more than to create anything.
In the search for answers on how to proceed, I came upon (by teacher suggestion) the Project M. It's pretty well known by now, but if unfamiliar:

We are part of a design movement. We believe that ability equals responsibility. And we are not the only ones. So, we built a lab where designers like you can make a difference. We are building the tools that will build the future.

While poking around the PM site, I found this article:
THREE WISHES:
(What Your Students Want, Even If They Don’t Know It Yet)

The author (E. Heiman) brings up a lot of good questions, and follows up by answering them... it's a recommended read if you're a design student or at all interested in the applications of design and how it can be brought up out of it's superficiality. Basically, what B. Fuller would have wanted.

Some content from the article:

Until a design student has such an eye-opening realization, how can we expect him or her to create meaningful output? In our classrooms we stress form, content, typography, craft, professionalism, and probably most importantly, cultivating a personal design voice. But how can a design student cultivate a voice they don’t yet know they have, nor know how to access? We often ask our students to take a stand with their work, to be authors. Have we ever stopped to think that maybe they don’t know HOW to do this?

Most of the graphic design in this country seems to fall comfortably into two categories: on one end of my personal all-encompassing design stick there is the market-driven commercial work; on the other, the more inwardly focused work that often comes from within academia’s walls or from the fringe realms of fine art. There is a small amount of work, though, being done in between these two poles that combines the consumer galvanizing motivations of the commercial with the self-initiated, critical mores of the academic.

I am not condemning the work at the each end of this proverbial stick. I myself do both kinds, and appreciate what they provide spiritually and financially. But by only providing our students the abilities to articulate the shell instead of the whole entity, and worse, in a moral vacuum, this is all that they will do. Undergraduate design instruction that breaks down the wall between studio and the Humanities might help produce graduates that not only create more work in this aforementioned in between area, but also elevate the inquiry and quality of work on the two ends of this proverbial stick as well.

The recent words of Milton Glaser tell us, “If our field aspires to be significant and worthy of respect, it must stand for something beyond salesmanship.” So should design education.

Heiman continues to describe the current problems with design, which are the lack of focus on utility vs the overabundance of superficial "style". The condition is constantly being improved upon, but "FRESH!" is still a criterion.
Amongst the "Wishes" ( WISH 1: Let’s get over this inferiority-to-artists complex. // WISH 2: How about some new dialogue! I think we’re in a rut! // WISH 3: Curiosity, Empathy, Humility. ) I found yet another article: Wonders Revealed: Design and Faux Science.


(here's a hi-res of this :D )

Hmmm... faux science. That rings a bell.
Personally, I love science. I like to learn about new advancements, as well as study the progression of old ones. I'm fascinated with the universe, it's workings, how it's put together. I'd happily attend lectures or be lectured at by physics majors, if I knew any.
Nevertheless, I'm guilty. And so are a WHOLE lot of other designers, thinkers, and artists as of late.
It's a good read, only a few pages, but basically Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel critique the current state of affairs, like so:

This new scientific style-seeking — let’s call it Faux Science -
- is the antithesis of modernism: it’s form awaiting content, or worse,
serious form retrofitted with interchangeable content. So DNA is used
as a paradigm for business strategy, our genetic legacies reborn as
branding schemes for bran flakes. Petrie dishes are procured as objects
of desire, inhabited by blurry bacteria used to metaphorically
represent everything from bus schedules to bleach advertisements to the
end of civilization itself. Designers document and chronicle and
organize and record and list and process and craft endless diagrams
with carefully plotted line weights and meticulously managed color
specs, but what do they really know about enzymes or molecules or the
structure of an atom? What do they really know about the world?

And aren't they right? It's altogether too easy to shoot for insta-credibility just by attaching some theory, numbers, and molecular blobs to an otherwise bland and useless project.
Maybe I just haven't noticed other discussion on the matter (if that's the case, I'd like to know about it), but it seems like the fact that Science has become the "knee-jerk" go-to is the really gigantic, smelly "elephant in the room".

So, how can we save ourselves and design from being arbitrary, useless, & just-for-show?
From the pretentious cataloguing of dust bunnies?

Is true curiosity coupled with motivation the key?
Apparently it isn't hopeless yet:

Science represents an enormous opportunity for designers, but not
if their contributions remain fundamentally restricted by what they
know. At the core of this critique lie serious questions about the role
of education. Why don’t design students study music theory? Why aren’t
they required to learn a second language? And why, for that matter,
don’t they study science? “The difficulty lies not in the new ideas,”
wrote John Maynard Keynes, “but in escaping the old ones.” In other
words, design beyond reach.

What do you think?