OR the last two years, the field of design has enjoyed the popularity of a professional lifetime. It has appeared on the covers of Time and Business Week, its now famous figures profiled on Ted Koppel's "Nightline" and Charlie Rose. Annual awards were created, and new design-related publications proliferated.

With its titanium coating and colored gels, design was, literally, the bright surface of economic success, the gleam in the eye of a public eager to play with the products of prosperity, from Target teakettles to iMacs.

In light of last month's events, design's sharp flash, as a mirror of public mood, has started to reflect a different picture ó a view of an altered world, pocked by new realities. But design's traditional talent ó to pose then to solve problems ó could give it a role in leading the national recovery, emotionally and economically.

On Oct. 17, seven accomplished designers were presented with the Chrysler Design Awards, prestigious annual prizes for innovation and achievement in various disciplines of design.

That afternoon, the editors and reporters of House & Home invited them to sit and to discuss their responses to Sept. 11 and to the situations of the last six weeks. Can ó and should ó design play an important part? And how?

This year's award winners included Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, architects whose company, Studio Works in Los Angeles, is working with the Los Angeles Unified School District on high school design that could defuse the battle-like presence of high-security measures.

Susan Kare, an interface graphic designer in San Francisco, is known for the family of desktop icons produced for Apple, including the wristwatch whose hands spin as a task is performed ó work that has become a humorous, reassuring standard for personal computing software.

Stefan Sagmeister, a graphic designer based in New York, is well known for iconoclastic rock music packaging for clients like the Rolling Stones.

Kathryn Gustafson, a landscape architect in Seattle, creates meditative integrations of structure and nature, like the Arthur Ross Terrace for the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York.

Daniel Rozin is a new-media artist working as director of research at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, to transform complex digital technologies into humanistic crafts that engage the imagination.

Thom Mayne is an architect in Santa Monica, Calif., whose company, Morphosis, is presently designing a federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore. He has proposed a glass box for the project that will, he hopes, transcend with optimistic transparence a fortress-like future that may now seem inevitable in the construction of government buildings.

Also participating in the round table were Paula Scher, a graphic designer at Pentagram in New York; David Kelley, an industrial designer and founder of Ideo in Palo Alto, Calif., whose rÈsumÈ includes the Palm V and the Apple mouse; John Hockenberry, an NBC News correspondent and design writer; Patrick Best, an industrial design student; Steven Heller, art director of The New York Times Book Review and the author of 80 books on design; and Phil Patton and Chee Pearlman, who write for House & Home.

Several days later, several designers also responded with actual designs ó ultimately, what designers do when called to answer. Ms. Scher created a pin that is part flag, part memorial in its graphic symbol. Mr. Sagmeister's proposal for Cipro, right, facilitates its correct use in an emergency by incorporating instructions into the packaging itself. He is also at work on a pin, "A Heart (Unbreakable)," stamped from metal from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

As Ms. Kare wrote in a follow-up note, "When times are confusing, it's more important than ever to produce images of clarity and simplicity."

Q: How might design participate now, in the national effort at recovery and reassurance?

STEFAN SAGMEISTER: After the 11th, I felt fairly useless. I would make a really bad fireman or rescue worker. What can one do? What we're working on right now is a pin. Sort of like a personal memorial.

PAULA SCHER: There's going to be a lot of involvement between design and the city ó because they're married. New York City is a design city ó designers will be involved. We're going to rebuild a whole section of town. Which is what designers do ó they make things.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: It's a city that functions because essential information is communicated to large numbers of people very, very quickly, which is what the signage is about. I think design is, in many ways, a language in which we will understand the aftermath of Sept. 11. There's been an excavation of the function of the city through these events: the image of Con Ed, of the firemen. It's a kind of a beginning to redefine and to reconnect with all these kinds of institutions. And designers will be leading that task.

Q: Should designers be reassessing what they do?

ROBERT MANGURIAN: In the last 10 years, the computer information industry turned the economy into a revved-up, hyped-up machine that is producing endless numbers of extremely well-designed objects. But new things keep the economy rolling. So it's problematic. If you design a perfectly good chair, it really could last forever. Which puts designers out of business. And puts chair makers out of business too.

Q: Should this be seen as a call for designers to be more socially responsible then?

THOM MAYNE: Architecture over the last 20 years has been somewhat aloof from its social tasks. For me it's not at all an issue of responding instantly to this event. It's meaningless ó it's like the flags going out. I find them actually quite disturbing ó somehow kind of intentionally not allowing us to understand the kind of deeper meaning of this. I think in architecture, hopefully, that it's going to force us to, as a community, re-look at our work. Kind of interesting it's taking place in the beginning of a new century.

MARY-ANN RAY: If we have to make do with less, how do we as designers operate in that situation? We travel to other countries that don't have the kind of means that we have, the kind of invention and design. But just on the street, the way things are made have a kind of wisdom.