I’m warning you this is a really long one.
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Ok, ok, i’ll jump on the bandwagon of responses to Are designers the enemy of design?, a Businessweek article that has everyone in the industry reacting.
So let’s make this a smart analysis, paragraph by paragraph, so you understand the context of my response if you haven’t read the article.
(Quote 1)
“Are Designers The Enemy of Design?
In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.
So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.
This is simply not true. Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only be done by great star designers. But the design of our music experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs, the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats, the design of our Class of ’95 brochures, the design of our screens, the design of the designs on our bodies—We are all designing more of our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives.”
(Response 1)
This first part is calling for a definition of design to help the discourse because there seems to be a confusion between craft, personalization and design. I’ll use one that I particularly like right now out of “The Politics of the Artificial” from Victor Margolin: “the design activity [is] a demonstrative form of problem solving”.
Design is not everywhere, personalization and mass customization are everywhere. The design part of it hides in allowing for those platforms to exist. Those services are designed. Saying that someone “designed” their myspace page is like saying I used to “design” the covers of my books just because I used to make them mine by scribbling on them and making doodles. Just because the audience has gone from being your classmates (for my books) to a community (for MySpace) does not make that activity “design”. I usually don’t design for myself, as a professional I design for others and I listen to other people’s needs. People putting up videos, putting together their own playlists and customizing their shoes and MySpace pages don’t think about others. They think about themselves, what they need and want. That is the most egotistic activity because you’re only out to please yourself. And that’s fine, that what the service was DESIGNED for, for self expression, the tools have simply changed and design’s role is now hidden.
People have always participated in the design of their lives, that’s why they chose IKEA chairs, Fendi bags and fly with KLM. People will always make decisions to “design their lives” or “have it their way”. That doesn’t make any of that “design”, just consumer choices. Whether those choices are made on or offline is hardly the point.
(Quote 2)
So Lesson One here is that the process of design, the management of the design process, is changing radically. Egos and silos are coming down, participation is expanding, tools are widespread and everyone wants to play. People want to be in the design sandbox so you have to figure out how to get them in and do design with them. This is a huge challenge.
Let’s talk about the arrogance of architects. When I began covering architecture a decade ago for Business Week, we launched an annual contest with Architectural Record. When we were about to publish pictures of the first winners, I looked at all the fancy architecture magazines. None had any pictures of people inside buildings. The buildings were all devoid of people. And most still are. We put people inside the spaces they inhabit. We inserted people into the conversation of their lives. Now, smart architects engage the masses in their designs. They hire firms who do social geography, showing how people really interact in organizations, not what their titles suggest. Informed with this information, they design spaces.
(Response 2)
Architecture is a completely different breed of designers: they are are “the apex of the design hierarchy” as Margolin puts it. No they’ve never been too keen on involving people historically but that’s never really affected their status. They have a very strong sense of cultural value and their status in the media is more important than any other field of design. When it comes to including people in their processes, well that will certainly be the more difficult of all to achieve. Green building, yes, user-generated architecture, wishful thinking. And to be honest I’m not sure I’d want my office building to be designed by the next door neighbor. Just like Steve Jobs isn’t interested in amateur productions, well I’m not interested, as a person, in amateur architecture.
(Quote 3)
So one Big Design Management Challenge is how do you switch gears from designing for to designing with? Maybe the object of design is not a finished product but a set of tools that allow people to design their experiences for themselves. Think iPod and iTunes. Think TiVo. Starbucks. Fortunately, design has tremendous tools. In fact, design has evolved from a simple practice to a powerful methodology of Design Thinking that, I believe, can transform society. By that I mean Design, with a capital D, can move beyond fashion, graphics, products, services into education, transportation, economics and politics. Design can become powerful enough to be an approach to life, a philosophy of life. But it can do so only when Design by Ego ends and Design by Conversation begins. More on that later.
(Response 3)
As noted before, the iPod and iTunes hardly included users in their design process. Apple couldn’t be farthest from the web2.0 ethos and we still love their products. Just because we’re not designing platforms for virtual expression doesn’t make your average Joe qualified enough to build their own blender in a 3D printer, or gun for that matter. Depending on where you live design actually has entered education, culture, economics. Come and live in Holland you’ll see what i mean. Design is not practiced in the United States.
(Quote 4)
Back to the backlash against design. Designers suck because they are also IGNORANT, especially about sustainability. The rap against designers is that they design CRAP that hurts the planet. That’s the argument. Let’s take your favorite toy, designed by one of today’s design gods, Jonathan Ive and his team at Apple—the iPod. Apple does fantastic things with materials. Amazing things. And it has recycling programs for its products. But what it doesn’t do is prioritize cradle-to-cradle design. It doesn’t design a long-cycle product that you can open and upgrade over time. It doesn’t design a process that encourages the reuse materials again and again. It doesn’t demand sustainability.
So ask yourselves if you demand sustainability in your laptops, your iPods, cell phones, cars, or houses. There are mountains of computers and iPods and cell phones and stuff—your old stuff—building up in India and Chinas, leaking toxic chemicals. Greenpeace has launched a Green My Apple campaign. Europe tipped green in the 90s. The U.S. tipped green just last year.
(Response 4)
Funny that, I thought that the iPod was an icon, now it’s an unsustainable object. Well all products, since the aftermath of the financial crash of the 20s are now on an obsolescence based-market that the United States created to make sure the economy would pick up since they had invested in heavy industry-based infrastructures whose success was based on how many units were sold. Apple doesn’t demand sustainability because the rest of the world wants shiny new things all the time. And because it easier to keep going with the market and not changing well, they’re acting slowly. Demanding sustainability comes from the consumer who is the only weapon against the mass industries. Vote with your dollar and the company will change and stop buying every new color of Shuffles. Nothing to do with designers. They get hired by these corporations and have as much chance to influence them and their processes as i have of being convinced of changing careers.
(Quote 5)
I actually think that of all the designers in the US design professions, architects are the greenest. Architects are the leaders in terms of sustainability. Building according to LEED specs is the norm for big corporations. Bank of America is putting up an incredibly green building near Bryant Park. One wonderful green trick– it uses cheap electricity at night to make ice in the basement to cool the skyscraper in the morning. Bring back the ice box.
The broad new paradigm for design—the paradigm you will all work within for the rest of your lives—is sustainability. When you have venture capitalists at the latest TED conference in Monterrey crying, literally crying onstage, about the planet, sustainability is hot, hot, hot. So the iPod is cool but…..
(Response 5)
Ok so architects are shit and now they’re not… very good, we’re making progress. Funny how they didn’t need to consider people in order to build green buildings. How do they do it? I would suggest you look at what’s being done in the UK. Venture capitalists would sell their mother to the mormons if they could make money out of it. It’s like trusting a politician that cries about the wounded in the Iraq war. Sustainable design doesn’t come from individual designers but from top down decisions. If big corporations such as the oil industry in the US don’t decide to change their business models, then every plastic based company will keep hiring people with experience in plastics. Just because an individual designer might decide to go green, then his potential job opportunities will be drastically reduced. Top down, not bottom up. Bruce Sterling said it to Alex Steffen, even if people decide to buy green products, their impact will be meaningless if the bigger industries don’t change. We’ll keep having plastic bottles for our “green window washing liquid”.
(Quote 6)
Challenge Your Assumptions. Think about the mink coat. It is beyond cool. It’s sustainable. You feed those little rat-y things with garbage that you throw out or food you grow, you create something that is comfortable, beautiful and gives you warmth for your entire life, you pass it along to another generation or recycle it or simply let it disintegrate. It’s organic, after all.
All you folks in fashion, try and rethink materials. Fashion is one of the most creative of the design fields—obviously. But what does it mean to design fashion within a sustainable context. I think it means changing materials. How can you fashion a fashion process, that focuses on bringing a new line out twice a year, that allows materials to be reused again and again in different ways? Or should designers try and design clothes that last far longer than one season or two? And why are organic materials, bamboo and cotton, so expensive? And how do you price for all of this. Hard questions.
(Response 6)
This is a tough one but let’s think things through. If we stop our manufacturing processes in the fashion industry, that means less work for foreign workers. This might mean the end of exploitation but in their shoes, in their economies, the little that they are making is helping their families survive. So we put them out of work and feel better about ourselves as we starve those countries to death. Great. Objects have social and economic ramifications that we choose to ignore when the argument sounds great.
(Quote 7)
Let me stop and make a suggestion. Skip your next trip to Milan or Miami and head, instead, for the reservation. Visit the Navajo and Hopi, the Pueblo Indians, the Souix and the Cheyenne. These folks lived a sustainable lifestyle long before it became both fashionable and necessary. There’s a lot left to their eco-culture. Learn from them—their contemporary artists in weaving, pottery, painting and jewelry are among the most innovative and creative in the world.
Take the Navajo Hogan, a simple six-sided building. Hogans sit lightly on the land—no 10,000 or 20,000 square foot McMansions for the Navajo. Hogan are easy to assemble, use little energy to keep people warm, and have strong spiritual meaning to the families who inhabit them. Today’s modern hogans are trailors and they are all over the rez. Now think about trailors. They, too, sit lightly on the land, are kind of prefab, and use little energy. In a world focused on sustainability, is the trailor worse than a cool building designed by Rem Koolhass or Frank Gehry?
(Response 7)
This is laughable social example. Amerindians, especially in Canada are among the least happy people now. The rates of drug addiction, alcoholism and suicide are the highest and the illegal traffic that goes on is renowned. Their sustainability came from culture and their beliefs. Does their sustainability have anything to do with their creative powers, I don’t think so. It’s part of their lifestyles. The day it enters our lifestyles, we might change. Not something that will ever be designed or designable. Their architectural structures also came from being a society of nomads, something they had to be as the west was “conquered”. We have long ago ceased to be nomads and our idea of settling down, having a family, owning land, goes against those nomadic habits.
(Quote 8)
the next bit is all about you Bruce, so that i cant comment on it.
(Quote 9)
A final point on language: Innovation and Design. Business men and women don’t like the term “design.” I think they think it implies drapes or dresses. Even top CEOs who embrace design don’t want to call it that. They want to call it “Innovation.” That has a manly right to it. It’s strong, techie. These folks are perfectly willing to use the word “vision,” whatever the heck “vision” is. They like “Imagination,” whatever the heck that is. But they don’t like “design.” Go figure.
I solve this problem by calling it all a banana. Innovation, design, eco-imagination, just call it whatever they want to call it and do your design thing. Because your design thing is a glorious thing that has the potential of changing our lives in a myriad of ways in a myriad of places.
(Response 9)
Because design has a history, because design has a culture, a language, people behind it. It’s easier in a boardroom to hide behind innovation, because it’s empty of all those things. People are rarely remembered as being “a great innovator”, “had such great imagination”, “had great vision”, because that means he didn’t do anything that people might relate to directly.
He/she was a great designer, inventor, engineer, architect, graphic designer.
Not a banana.
