Gunnar, Ricardo, and list:

Yesterday my 40 year old son Micah, owner of Start Something Bold, a design firm that helps manufacturing/service and medical product/service companies innovate their future using design, presented his firm's design process and methods, particularly Journey Mapping (the topic of the day), to my Freshman Design Thinking and Creative Methods class. The lead principles in his firm are a graphic designer (my son), an industrial designer, and an engineer. He mentioned that they still design products and services but that this is only about 20% or less of their design effort. The rest of their design effort is research, analysis, design with a big D (strategy, innovation, concept), and reporting to management. After just a few years they're named on numerous patents and have more work than they can do. They are living reality that AIGA calls for in 2025. 

During the Q&A a student asked Micah if they do branding and identity design. My son said yes and no. Yes, they lay the foundation for branding and they sketch naming and branding concepts but no, they don't design final brand or identities nor do they implement brands through design of a branding guide. They work at the strategic level before brand implementation. It turns out this Freshman student asked because she had just been hired to do branding project for a local entrepreneur. Mind you, UC Communication Design students start co-oping in their forth semester, but even so, this young woman (mid second semester) was getting a head start! She was asking Micah how much she should charge.

So, the seasoned professional is solving wastewater problems and reducing death through infection from surgery, the Freshman student is designing a brand for a local food product. BOTH use thinking through making processes but at very different scope and tangibility levels: my son working in the fairly distant future on systems, my student working in the present on a single product. 

I offer the foregoing as one very recent example, an illustration, of some of what I take you to be saying. The basics of communication design such as symbology and branding are essential, will not go away so long as there is communication, and NEED RESEARCH to understand better how they work (the last is my favorite ax to grind).

AND, 

Communication design has an essential part to play in nearly every large systemic problem: in the information age, usually a leading part.

Both go together. It takes more experience and a broader skill set to do the big D work, for example, how to find dishwashers to interview in Moscow (ans: hire a recruiter). Learning to do branding is good in itself and an important part of larger design projects. I personally don't think a new designer can jump directly from small to large. I think learning to do branding (or other narrowly defined design projects) is a necessary step toward learning how to work on broad systems projects that include the necessary narrower ones. This belief is based on history (it's how Micah and I did it) as well as logic and learning theory, scaffolding from simpler to more complex. But there may be other ways. I just don't know them.

I have personally experienced that this climb up the strategic ladder has been going on in design generally, and communication design in particular, for 40 years, and that the boundaries between the disciplines have been blurring and new sub-specializations (interaction design, information design, etc.) have been growing for that same period. 

So, while the question of this thread is provocative, I think the conclusions are both clear and nothing new: Design as a discipline, communication design as part of that, is changing from an important but narrow task to an important broad and narrow task. 

Said differently, what was Graphic Design is now a sub specialty of Communication Design. What was a whole has become one part.

I also note that predictions are easy except as they describe the future. Ask any typesetter (my grandfather was one) how quickly a "necessary" skill can disappear and change the future. 

My prediction is that communication design will get much better at OUTCOME evaluation over the next 25 years so that a routine part of practice will not only be to innovate new things for big D projects but also measure their impact in outcome terms (not outputs) at all necessary levels.

Or so I believe...

Please forgive the long post re-stating what's obvious to most everyone on this list. Yesterday's experience just fit too well to ignore it!

Mike Zender
University of Cincinnati


-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------