Stories, moments, people and ideas of interest from within the worlds of innovation and design, spotted and written about by Helen Walters, writer and researcher at Doblin, a member of Monitor Group. Attitude, errors and opinions all the writer's own.
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Yesterday, Fast Co Design published an essay by Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut, entitled The Main Failing Of Design Schools: Kids Can’t Think For Themselves. In it, the legendary graphic designer, Pentagram partner and longtime advocate of design divides design education into two camps: process-driven or portfolio-driven, and concludes that neither serves anyone in this day and age particularly well.
Modern design education… is essentially value-free: every problem has a purely visual solution that exists outside any cultural context. Some of the most tragic victims of this attitude hail not from the world of high culture, but from the low. Witness the case of a soft-drink manufacturer that pays a respected design firm a lot of money to “update” a classic logo. The product of American design education responds: “Clean up an old logo? You bet,” and goes right to it. In a vacuum that excludes popular as well as high culture, the meaning of the mark in its culture is disregarded. Why not just say no? The option isn’t considered.
It was Bierut’s conclusion that had me clapping my hands in agreement:
It’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.
"Personally, I’m a minimalist: I value content more highly than aesthetics."
— In Graphic Designers Are Ruining The Web, Observer writer John Naughton outlines his dismay that so many webpages have turned into so much bloat (over the last decade, the size of web pages has more than septupled.) He has a point, and designers and developers certainly need to work together to create streamlined pages that work whether you have broadband or dial-up. But don’t you find the quote above peculiar? It’s like he has no idea that minimalism is itself a design choice. The pages he professes to adore all accord with a set of design principles, even if those principles are to include a whole boatload of information (and, as it happens, have nothing whatsoever to do with minimalism.) Craigslist may be designed according to “un-design” principles, but it’s designed nonetheless. It’s a shame that more people don’t understand this, and it’s somewhat infuriating to hear designers equated, as here, with dumb maniacs who gleefully refuse to understand how the web works. Some of them are, of course. But it’s an unhelpful generalization, and makes for an irritating read. Don’t know about you, but I value content and I value aesthetics, and I firmly believe that the two can co-exist. </rant>
"The FDA recently revealed that factory animal farms now burn through fully 80 percent of all antibiotics consumed in the United States."
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Horrifying story from Mother Jones detailing The FDA’s Christmas Present for Factory Farms. In a nutshell, the FDA has decided not to pursue its decades-long quest to limit the routine use of antibiotics on animal farms, ruling instead that now it will support voluntary reform.
Now, it should be remembered that the original goal of the FDA to curb antibiotic use in such farms was not born from deference for the health and well-being of the animals. This isn’t lefty animal lib hysteria, but because, as noted here, even by 1977, “it was already obvious that routine use of these drugs would generate antibiotic-resistant pathogens that endanger humans.” You know, the kind of thing the FDA is really designed to care about.
Yet the real horror of the story is not merely the stark statistic above, which should surely strike fear into the heart of all, but the insanity of the idea that somehow the billion-dollar meat industry is suddenly going to voluntarily curb its antibiotic use in a moment of thoughtful self-regulation. We KNOW that doesn’t happen, right? And then, of course, there’s writer Tom Philpott’s “oh right, duh” conclusion: it’s the money, stupid. As he writes, the action “could be a signal that the FDA is delaying real action until after the 2012 election, in an effort to keep meat-industry “dark money” from flowing to President Obama’s opponent. In 2011, the Obama administration has acted repeatedly to appease agribussiness [sic] interests.”
"If design, as a broad field, really does want to start doing some good in the world, it is essential that design develops a clearer voice in public discourse. We need to argue the case for design’s importance throughout education as an integrated practice and be rigorous in understanding the context in which we operate. That means looking outward, not naval gazing. A glance through the abstracts of a great deal of research journals and conferences points to the latter. This is a terrible irony given the fact that many of us practice human-centered design research that expressly aims to avoid the effects of designing from within ivory towers."
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In Design Research and Education: A Failure of Imagination? British designer, researcher and educator Andy Polaine makes a powerful case for the failure of our academic institutions to produce the creative thinkers our future really needs. It’s a long piece, and well worth the read, particularly his argument that the gap between design theory and design practice is not merely detrimental at an academic level.
We have sold what we do as magic at the cost of hiding our thinking process and when we hide our process we can no longer articulate it, teach it or give it the value it deserves.
Seems to me that the responsibility for imagining and implementing a future that is not bankrupt in terms of economy, politics or culture lies with those who can temper the apparently hyperrational forces that currently dominate business with the ability to see further, imagine more, do better—and explain it all convincingly to those same hyperrationalists. Seems to me, as Polaine puts it, the challenge for educators and designers to stop squabbling about semantics becomes ever more pertinent.
The next time you make breakfast, pay attention to the exquisitely intricate choreography of opening cupboards and pouring the milk — notice how your limbs move in space, how effortlessly you use your weight and balance. The only reason your mind doesn’t explode every morning from the sheer awesomeness of your balletic achievement is that everyone else in the world can do this as well.
With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?
"
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In A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, Bret Victor goes ballistic over some of those “Future of Technology” videos that have been doing the rounds of late. His problem: that the ideas contained therein are lame. Or, as he puts it:
This vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.
He’s totally right. What we really need from our leaders, our technologists and our innovators is imagination that doesn’t just extend the status quo, it builds a future the mere mortals among us couldn’t picture. Otherwise, they’re just engaging in a slow, steady slide into a present that is simply a continuation of what we have now. And that—not merely from an interaction perspective—is the last thing we need.
