: What are great examples of the influence that design has? There is a quote that "bad design never killed anyone," but I know that what we do is less trivial than that. What designs have you

@Caterina889

The Stop sign comes to mind.

Before design was unified each state, county, and city was free to have their own form of stop sign. Colors could range from yellow, to orange, to red, even green in a few cases. And shapes, while mostly circular, varied as well - some rectangles, triangles, and circles.





The (federally mandated) unification of design has saved countless lives since it was instituted.

Wikipedia - stop sign
History of the stop sign

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@Ravi4787994

Target's pharmaceutical packaging comes to mind. Dubbed ClearRx, it originated as a student project at SVA and Target picked it up. Here's a couple of starting points for info.
deborahadlerdesign.com/casestudy/?id=target - The designer who pioneered ClearRX talking through her story, with images illustrating the process
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearRx

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@Speyer780

You may want to focus your topic into the concept of information design, which is where graphic deign splits off from just being about making something look pretty to highlighting the information that is important to people.

One starting point might be to look at the Nudge blog where occasionally they highlight how design can "nudge" people into making different (better) decisions.

Some examples include:


Landfill


Look before you cross the road


Light switch stickers to save energy


Also look for things like nutrition information on menu cards or receipts, revised stickers for showing fuel efficiency of vehicles, re-designed legislation....

And, if the kids are old enough and can appreciate some humor, painting gods and goddesses on walls in India to prevent public urination, or placing a small image of a fly or some other object in the "sweet spot" for urinals (where the amount of urine that splashes out is minimized). It turns out that men don't pee on their deities, and they love to aim their urine stream at targets!



Update

You may also want to mention something about graphic designers as preservers of culture. I do remember having read some papers a long time ago about studies that show how the role of graphic design is important because of what the graphics themselves might say about a society at a given point in time. The justification is along the lines that graphic designers need to know what people respond to on an emotional level if they expect people to respond positively to their designs.

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