While the impact of design and design thinking might be dwindling in some areas, in other areas they are just coming in fashion.
The fact that the endorsement by a celebrity might have bigger impact on sales should not dishearten us. For decades mass media have debilitated the general population and have created particular patterns of thinking. In a number of domains the impact of opinion leaders is stronger than the impact of content quality. Our societies do not elect in office the best and the brightest. Rather, they elect people who are depicted in favorable light by the media. A soccer player for a mayor? A tennis player for a president? A taxi driver for a prime minister? So why not people dress like Lady Gaga?
Evidently the problem is not only in the design field. It actually more severe politics. Let's elect one of us, one that hasn't gone to school like us, that had difficult childhood like us, but now he/she has managed to break the glass ceiling and become a powerful person or a celebrity. We like this, it give us a hope that someday we will break the glass ceiling too. I can talk a lot about this, but this is not the place and time, and actually, why go in confrontation with the almighty mass media and the whole world?
Our worries about the demise of design thinking should pale in comparison with our worries regarding many other processes in society. Still, let's not forget that dozens of new design areas have emerged in the last decades: instructional design, communication design, service design, organizational design; programming architecture, hardware architecture, and so forth. There is hope.
However, when we design aircraft careers, Lady Gaga cannot beat us. Crowdsourcing cannot beat us. Our strength is in the areas of complex sociotechnical systems rather than in the design of everyday objects where the process of appreciation is strongly affected by social forces.
Just musing.
Cheers,
Lubomir
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ben jonson
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 10:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The questionable death of design thinking
Apropos arguing that "design thinking" is over, maybe even dead, Kenneth Grange, in a recent Blueprint interview, says [quote]:
Marriages - like that of Ive and Jobs -
are less common now than they were in
the Seventies and Eighties, because 'the
great financial forces of darkness have
taken over. Braun, Pirelli, Olivetti,
Hermann Miller, they all had powerful
design identities. But now if shares drop,
firms will bring in someone like Lady Gaga
[to boost the brand's image, rather than rely
on real design thinking]. That's straight
forward heavy duty commerce, the share
price drives everything.'
http://www.hitchmylius.co.uk/v634456567037670000/file/1001169/Kenneth_Grange_Blueprint_August_2011.pdf
|