I’ve been talking to more than a dozen of designers last few days as I was looking for a designer to design our book. I always enjoy meeting and talking to designers as I am always fascinated how their minds work. I’m happy because I think I’ve found the right team. We were having a great discussion on graphic design in general. I am very good in identifying people’s with unique skills and style. My friends all know that I am gifted in “rapid profiling”.
Despite so much is written that designers can “change the world”, majority are only interested in trying to look hip and cool. Many don’t have a reasons behind what they are doing. What's the % of designers that are actually design thinkers?
Just this past weekend GAIN (AIGA's conference on business and design) was held at the Roosevelt Hotel, NYC. Debbie Millman of AIGA presided over this year's 20/20 challenge, in which 20 thriving designers were asked to communicate the secret of their business success in a 60-sec visual presentation. I wish I was in town to see this. Participants included Michael Ian Kaye, Julia Hoffmann (MoMA), and Armin Vit...but for sheer star power lit was hard to beat Chip Kidd (Designer of hundreds of magazine covers including The New Republic, Time Magazine, NY Times, Graphis, and ID magazines. Among his growing list of accolades is the International Center of Photography's award for Use of Photography in Graphic Design). According to Kidd, "The next step for a graphic designer is to meaningfully generate his own content." So we return to the question of art and what it is.
Graphic design is generally considered an applied art instead of a fine art. It has been like that for a long time. I guess it is fair to say that 9 of 10 graphic designers are commercial designers and probably 5 working in a production studio. Less than 1 out of 10 has the opportunity to escalate commercial art to a almost-fine-art status. Someone that transforms a book or a poster into a work of art, an art object. The designs represent the contents and the author's intentions or philosophies, maintaining a fine balance between the content and the design.
Designers never have the attention that they have today. With Tom Peters,then Bruce Nussbaum (B-week) and then Roger Martin (Rottman) advocating the benefit of design in corporate context, the story is slowing getting mainstream.
When New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center wanted to make the chemotherapy process easier on patients 3 years ago, it went to design firm IDEO for help. Stanford now has an IDEO-inspired Institute of Design that teaches "design thinking". One IDEO technique that proved tricky for the clinic was "rapid prototyping," clinic managers were used to a slower, more planned approach and that was a little uncomfortable for them.
When the Home Office wanted to solve the crime problem in the UK, they turn to designers. The Design Council, the Home Office and the Design and Technology Alliance have unveiled a major expansion of the Designing Out Crime initiative. Backed by £1.6m, it aims to develop innovative design solutions over the next 3 years to help prevent robbery, to crime-proof new gadgets, and to embed public safety in the design of public spaces and housing. Think crowdsourcing of James Bond’s gadgets.
The program breaks down into 5 areas: reducing problems such as bullying and petty theft in schools, led by Sir John Sorrell of the Sorrell Foundation; making new products more crime-proof, led by Bristol University’s Joe McGeehan; embedding crime-reducing approaches in housing design, led by forensic psychologist Ken Pease; reducing alcohol-related crime, led by the Royal College of Art’s Jeremy Myerson; and minimizing crime against businesses, led by Lorraine Gamman of Central St Martins College of Art and Design. Design school is fun these days.
