designswarm thoughts

So I’m back in Montreal after 3 years and nothing seems to have changed. I’d like to be proven wrong though. I am really amazed that whenever we speak of design here, what shows up is either related to urban design, architecture or interior design. Where is everything else? Certainly not listed on the pathetic site of the Institut de Design de Montreal which is getting more and more flash-y and less and less usable for anyone in the industry.

A quick overview of last month’s “portes ouvertes” of Montreal designers is a testament to this lack of variety:

- architecture and urban design firms (24)
- graphic design firms (10)
- interior design firms (4)
- product design (4)
- fashion design (2)
- museum installation design (1)

This is to say the least, pathetic.

No interactive projects, no photography, no wacky stuff, no multi-disciplinary labs, independent small time product designers. The Internet hello? Multi-media stuff, internet of things, mobile, anyone? Where are they hiding? Where is creativity being channeled? What are the hundreds of designers graduating every year doing now? Where are they showing their work? What are they working on? How is the design industry doing? What are the roadblocks? What is this thing people here call “design”?

Whenever anyone asks me “why don’t you work here”, well I usually answer “there’s no work and too much education to do”. Why does that always sound like I’m being a traitor? Why do I feel I’m wrong but have nothing to prove it?

So I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and try to spend the next month meeting people I already know, reporting from the frontiers, walking around the city, looking for design. You will of course be able to read all about it here dear reader :) I might even make a special section for it! (woohoo an excuse to use the page function on my blog).

I’m dying to understand.

So I you know of anyone who would like to speak to me about this or you know of people I should go meet, places I should go see, PLEASE contact me!

I’m cleaning my stuff for the flight tomorrow and came across this torn bit of paper that’s a printout off of someone’s work… need to find the source…

“Like Marcel who narrates through his recollections of places and things in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, visual connections between objects and memory are as much a symbiotic exchange as they are a token of human dependancy. To consider a world without objects is to take away a part of our identity, which helps us understand and comprehend the world in which we live.”

Amen to that.

I miss my tapes!.

Via Computerlove

The previous post on the new puritain reminded me of a movement in Québec that started a few years ago called “Simplicité Volontaire” which is explained on this french website and which basically advocates a different and richer way of living that gets away from our conventional understanding of being rich (ie involving money).

What this makes me ponder about is the fact that whatever it is that i am to come up with has to have sex appeal and appeal to people as being in conjunction with their lifestyle and cater to their need for status through it. These are all fairly obvious considerations but very difficult to implement and design for. Perception is a fragile beast.

This Guardian article descibes an interesting social twist on current concerns about consumerism.

“So, with a few grand gestures and some high-profile converts New Puritanism offers a powerful escape route from our impulsive, reward-driven lifestyles. It might just have the potential to stave off the horrors promised by an out-of-control consumerist culture in which, according to agrarian essayist Wendell Berry, ‘The histories of all products will be lost. The degradation of products and places, producers and consumers is inevitable.’”

I am not sure turning to the Amish lifestyle that’s advocated here is the best way to get any kind of social responsibility message across but its a start :-)

On my quest for the perfect thesis projet i will look at how we interact with products around us, what fuels the consumerism patterns we know in order to derail them and direct them to shared and communal experiences. So a starting point for me is to understand the consumer and what is the landscape of innovation, marketing and consumer driven tools.

I found an article on emotionally driven design. As people reinvent themselves daily and change the attitudes they have depending on their surroundings, the products we surround ourselves with need to have that same level of flexibility and need to grab us in these transient times.

“The aspirational you is one of those drivers of emotional consumption. With the multiple choices available to us in our 10 second on-line shopping experiences, the emotion of design becomes the absolute driver. If you’re not emotionally driven within a very short time frame, you’re only one click away from something else that will give you the emotional charge.”

This short attention span is very much a product of our “paradox of choice” as i like to call it, meaning that decision-making has become a very difficult business to conduct. We find ourselves constantly bombarded with information on many different layers and it’s hard to make sense of the big picture. So things have to grab our attention, practically hitting us like a ton of bricks with their relevance, with whichever tool that is available: advertising, positioning you name it. How do i tackle this mountain? Shall i operate without it, ignorning the elephant in the porcelain shop? Food for thought at the moment i havent made up my mind. Maybe I’ll subvert these tools in helping me and create a brand of products… close tag.