Two incidents recently provoked unprecedented media debate in Britain about the meaning of design. Firstly, the angry resignation of James Dyson (inventor of the bagless, dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner) as the Design Museum's Chair of Trustees. An exhibition about the pioneering mid-century styling maven Constance Spry - a Martha Stewart before her time but all too easily dismissed as a flower-arranger - was the final straw for the man who believes a design museum should principally demonstrate a sublime relationship between engineering and manufacturing technology. Secondly, the Design Museum jury's decision to award the prestigious title of Designer of the Year to Hilary Cottam, not herself a designer like her fellow candidates, but a social activist passionate about using "design thinking" to address deeply entrenched disfunction in public services, particularly prisons, schools, and health services. All of which begs us to ask: what is design anyway? In the twentieth century, chairs were really important touchstones of future thinking, as were labor-saving domestic devices, housing solutions for everyone, and, later, portable electronics. But these two incidents are at the center of a new discourse in which the meaning of design in our postmodernist, post-industrial world has irretrievably expanded. The image is recognized to be as significant as the artifact; the value of the service is known often to outstrip that of the goods; the built environment is a metaphysical concept full of hidden forces; regeneration finds more favor than the new; and design - for so many and for so long synonymous with the sleazy tag "designer" - regains some of its more abstract and divine original significance.

Design for Thought presents two great protagonists of this new-century approach. Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne have gathered a body of "critical" design work - speculative and therapeutic solutions to citizens' fears and desires; products that deliver the "complicated pleasure" (in Martin Amis's phrase, also invoked by Dunne and Raby) of a serious joke. The collection of examples is fantastic, and a persuasive testimony to the influence wielded by this extraordinary couple over a whole generation of Royal College of Art graduates. Meanwhile Industrial Facility, led by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin, our most brilliant product designers, constantly question the tools and objects of our lives; also critical designers, in their way, they reject extreme consumption and undue technical complexity. In their world - the "landscape" of which they frequently speak - objects become inevitable prosthetics of their physical context. It is encouraging that these advocates of austerity command the international commercial attention that they do, when conventionally we expect design to leave more crude and obvious traces.

Alex Ward, the Israel Museum's talented and perceptive Curator, brought together this group of practitioners and has created a fascinating exhibition which is not only truly of our times, but full of promise for the future of design. We are pleased that Israel, a place of such creative tradition and innovation, where still so much is so new, should be the platform for these provocative design proposals. We feel fortunate to be partners in this important project and thank James S. Snyder, the museum's Director, for his enthusiastic support. Finally, the museum's recruitment of Graphic Thought Facility, the most significant British graphic designers of their generation, to design this publication completes a representation of the conditions for design in the UK that the British Council is delighted to support.