Design 21: Social Design Network

Hello David!

I completely agree that there's a lot of strange »design« out there. One of the fact is maybe that those who invest in a professional design won't call their products »design whatever«. It's like the waffle iron you mentioned in an earlier post.

By the way: here in Germany the word for »bath« is »bad« and strangewise some bathroom interior specialist call their shop »Bad Design« which is very stupid design in this case indeed. But back to the subject.

I only wanted to add to your post that design has to learn not only to solve but also create problems. Dunne & Raby for example call it »Design for Debate« - design that confronts people with strange products that embody future states of society and technology.

Bringing the design to the world already today opens the possiblity for a broad public to already discuss the problems that lie in new technologies like e. g. nanotechnology. I think this is also a very interesting task for design and for me it's a part of design research.

Doing research may also strengthen the designers image. Every profession needs an intellectual part so that it can be taken for serious. Otherwise we will still be stuck in the stereotypical stylist area for a long time I think.

Just some thoughts...

»There is a huge lack of knowledge among Swedish companies (mostly small and mid-size). And it is not because of the lack of clever and talented designers in Sweden...«, as David Carlson writes.

Hidden qualities of designers

I think a huge problem in this is the reputation that designers have. It is obvious that mostly designers are seen as the ones that have visual or styling competence. Of course this are the most important skills - but this is not all. Layouts can be done by an illustrator, products can be designed by craftsmen.

So for me, the hidden quality of the designer is the understanding of processes and strategies in design - or in the words of the starter of this post, David Carlson: »how to write a creative design brief«. I agree with him in this regard.

Reduced to a be stylist?

So is there really a »backlash«? Gui Bonsiepe would surely agree. In a lecture called Design & Democracy he held when he was granted of a honorary doctor at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana in Santiago de Chile in June 2005, he criticized that design more and more »moved away from the idea of »intelligent problem solving« (James Dyson) and drew nearer to the ephemeral, fashionable and quickly obsolete, to formal-aesthetic play, to the boutiquization of the universe of products of everyday life.«

Gui Bonsiepe is a scholar of Tomás Maldonado, who was teaching at the Ulm School of Design. And we know, at that school there was a lot of research connecting design with various disciplines as e. g. sociology and psychology. Or in the words of Maldonado »The HfG is not just a school where you are educated in a special subject; the HfG is more like a community whose members share the same intentions: bestowing structure and stability upon the world around us.«

Trans-, Multi- and Interdisciplinarity

The designer is a person who works non-disciplinary. He traverses different fields - whether they are of creative or theoretic nature. I think this is one of the qualities a designer has to have. And I'm wondering if this is getting lost in design education - for the sake of quickly educating photoshop or 3D freaks that you can enchain to the computer and tell them what to do.

I enjoyed the generalistic design studies at KISD. Meanwhile, as studying in Germany is not free of charge anymore, I can see that students start studying design who do not have any prior experience in other fields. Interdisciplinarity that is so essential to a designer's knowledge is suffering within this development.

Because designing means more than just knowing how to handle specific software... .

Would like to share this article/presentation ( many of you must have read it ) by Anne Galloway and seems to be contextual in the ongoing discussion (which is also to say that i subscribe to the idea presented here ):

Transit

Also, as Marco Siebertz had mentioned about Guy Bonsiepe, there's another paper by him titled 'Design as Tool for Cognitive Metabolism: From Knowledge Production to Knowledge Presentation', which i found it really interesting / inspiring too.

David, I think its not about talent but certainly it is about mind set. Its about free thinking when it comes to design. Its about communication which is meaning less in certain cases of design product. I mean the product is not able to deliver for what it is been developed.

We need to look on to control structures in terms of application. We need to talk to people. And certainly a better product will be eveloved through ideas and constant talking to each other, through cultural exchanges and sharing experiances on common grounds of working model.

-Pradeep

shm.pradeep@gmail.com

In every design school I've been to, designers are exhorted as the solution to most of the world's problems. Creativity and innovation is held up as the saviour of humanity. And each student is given to believe that she or he is the chosen one. How can this sustain? How many new ideas would actually succeed? How many unsuccessful ideas would it take for one successful idea? How much junk, clutter and waste do we contribute to creating? No one, bar the odd Victor Papanek, bothers to ask these questions. No one tries to contextualize the world to students in a realistic way, telling them: "Not every one of us is a genius. Designers aren't the only ones with ideas, nor even the best-qualified ones. We all must do what we have to do, but let us keep the greater good of the planet and all its people always in view."

Tendence erase local act, it´s not possible ! no more !

Some very good points raised - I'm sure this trend is seen in most western countries, not just Sweden.

For years I have been aware of how many people making critical strategic decisions about design and it's role in a product or brand, are not people who can see or appreciate the subtle difference between great/good design and average/poor design.

For most business people, marketing managers, budget holders, CEO's these decisions are based purely on their experiences of products and brands in their life to that point. Their opinions are very rarely the result of analysis and understanding of the subtle levels of communication that take place in all designs good or bad. On the whole they make judgements from the standpoint of someone who will have mostly consumed 'Average Design'.

The problem with so called 'Average Design' is that it swamps the market place and therefore lowers the bar for what is acceptable. One thing my days in publishing taught me is that for a while at least people will give most products a go no matter how poor the design - how can this be so?? I rationalised that if a product like a magazine makes it to the market place, end users perceive initially that it is good enough to be there, else why would it be there - who would spent all that money to make something that is bad!! With consumer goods this is magnified by demographics and price, the poor need cheap goods and there benchmark for assesment is other cheap goods. It is reasoned that cheap goods can't be as well designed as expensive goods, but that they must still be designed to some standard if they make it to the market place.

So we have a world that on the whole is swamped by 'Average Design' that is on the whole good enough in the eyes of the 'Average End User'. I call this the 'Democracy of Design'. As with politicians, manufacturers tend to do what they can get away with.

It is no coincidence that the few well designed brands and products out there, have either hung on to the values and ethics of more competitive times (lest say Apple), or have had owners with an almost philanthropic approach to their goals (lets say Dyson).

Unfortunately I do not see how things will change till either the consumers exorcise their democratic right and stop accepting 'Average Design' or those making decisions on Design become educated to the same level as the actual design community itself, god forbid they ever take out community so seriously that they actually start to trust our suggestions - now there's a thought!

These question will sound silly, but I'm not learning much about design at my university. I'm curious about what was mentioned above:

What is a creative design brief? How do I create one? What are the factors included in creating it?