Musings

Ok, so I’m finally getting a chance to sit down and write a reply to eye magazine about my tweet late last week. For those of you who missed that: “Yes, but this is a dated concept that has never caught on with business or designers. It is happening, ie. IDEO, Red Project.” This was in response to their tweet on their interview with Victor Margolin. I was asked by eye to elaborate.

Well, first of all I want to say how much I enjoyed the article and eye magazine in general (I own every issue but 3). My comment was not a critique of eye or the article itself but more about the timing of it. As I stated in my tweet, the discourse presented by Margolin in this interview is something both he and Richard Buchanan (see Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Design Issues vol.8 no.2 ) have been teaching and writing about for at least 20 years now. It is only now that others are taking notice.

My general critique of the article is, why has it taken so long for eye magazine and others in the “mainstream” design press to catch on to this concept? (Design Issues has been leading the way here for some time.)

This argument, for design to look beyond artifacts, can also be traced back to Victor Papanek and his thoughtful writing, ‘Design for the Real World’. I certainly do not want to bore those who have read this with the details, but essentially Papanek rallies for designers to broaden their scope of ‘design’ beyond “persuading people to buy things they don’t need,…” In it he continues the argument started by Buckminster Fuller and others who believe that the designer has a responsibility to humanity and that by looking beyond artifact based outcomes, toward complex systems, our time and our discipline would become much more relevant.

As I also mentioned in my tweet there are those who are working in this thoughtful manner today and have been for some time. These firms/individuals do not get covered by design mags because what they do cannot, necessarily, be neatly categorized, i.e. Graphic Design, Industrial Design, etc. It is using the thinking of design to solve much more complex ‘problems’ (I guess ‘issues’ could be another term, ‘developments’…) IDEO, The Design Council (Red Paper 02).

I think that it is great to see that eye is presenting this material, I only wish that more designers would see the possibilities of their discipline and understand that what we were taught can be applied to so many thoughtful endeavors. Designers need to continue to push the discourse beyond ‘making’ so that the discipline can grow and be given more credence by business leaders, especially in these trying economic times.

This is where the education of the designer comes in to play; how does one ‘teach’ design and design thinking? Some of my colleagues here at SCAD and elsewhere are seeing the need for the designer of the future to not only understand the value of good typographic choices, colors, etc., but also to understand the need for collaborative efforts, systems thinking, user based research, and the like.

In closing, I hope that this clarifies my position. If not, I can pick up this post, (which I may do anyway since it is such a deep topic to cover).

Until next post?