This design moment is also about a different marketplace — that of ideas.

The influential MoMA senior architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli believes that one of design’s most important functions is “to help people deal with change.” Her exhibitions have featured projects such as the EyeWriter, a pair of glasses outfitted with eye-tracking technology that lets a user “draw” with his eyes. Created for a paralyzed artist, the product is a collaboration between technologists and designers, and relies on open-source software. It has no commercial ambitions. It’s simply a sharp example of an expressive designed object.

We’re living in a time of “acknowledged urgency,” Antonelli says, and pragmatic fields from science to politics to business are looking to design for “inspiration, alternative processes, metaphor and a bit of uplift.” (“Delight” has become a buzzword in Silicon Valley.) As a result, design has become incredibly multifaceted in recent years, encompassing subfields such as interaction design, critical design, environmental design, social design, biodesign and service design, to name just a few. It’s become a medium for expressing ideas, raising provocative questions and addressing social and individual anxieties.

So is design a business builder or idea spreader? Both, often at the same time.

In earlier moments, the democratization of design was about what we could buy. Now it’s about what we can make and how we can sell. The online marketplace Etsy has redefined how small-scale makers can earn a living, or at least subsidize a creative hobby. Last year, the site hosted more than a million active shops. According to a 2012 survey, nearly a fifth of Etsy sellers considered running their creative businesses their full-time job. Crowdfunding services like Kickstarter also enable aspiring design entrepreneurs to find support for their projects. One breakaway success was an early-stage “smart watch” called Pebble, which could connect to smartphones, display emails and text messages and even run apps. Two years ago, without the backing of an established company — let alone venture capitalists — its founders raised more than half a million dollars in a matter of hours, eventually bringing in $10 million to develop the watch. As Maeda observed, today’s design student may be less interested in building a portfolio than in simply crowdfunding an idea.

Allan Chochinov, head of the Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts, talks about how design has moved “from the aesthetic, to the strategic, to the participatory.” In his thinking, the “open source” ideology we normally associate with certain corners of tech culture has made its way into design. Engineering and design are melding; code-y enterprises are making objects; and object makers are hardwiring all kinds of things with code. Young designers need to be conversant in tools like the Arduino platform (inexpensive hardware for programming interactive objects) and customizable Raspberry Pi computers (credit card-sized circuit boards that can plug into monitors and keyboards). Style, functionality and engineering are now one and the same, and even mundane objects are virtuously designed.

What is certain is that all these combined elements — style, function, social impact, creativity and profit motive — have yielded an original vision of what design is and why it matters. Design has fundamentally changed the way we experience the world, from the way we interact with objects to our expectations about how organizations are structured. It’s a new and exciting moment for design — that is, until the next one comes along.