by
Clement Mok
Although design is one of the most profoundly powerful
disciplines in our modern information culture, its identity as a
profession is in a state of incoherent disarray verging on crisis.
The economic slowdown and tenuous world situation provide us an
opportunity to come together as designers to articulate and
organize our professional culture, to enhance our recognition and
prestige within the context of an increasingly design-reliant
information economy, and to wield our influence in ways that will
benefit humanity and the planet.
Designing Design
If we as a profession are to effectively employ our skills for
change in the world at large, we must first look to our own
affairs. Technological advances over the past century have
dramatically multiplied the quantity and nature of information
engaged with by human beings. In addition, the tools for
displaying, manipulating, distributing and interacting with this
information have become dramatically more sophisticated.
Every juncture of information creation, storage, retrieval,
distribution and use entails design. If we think about this, it is
clear that there should be no profession in higher demand than that
of the designer: the potential applications of design skills, and
the need for those skills to distinguish and empower any given
information commodity, are overwhelming.
Nevertheless, and even improbably, designers are currently a
divided, fractious lot, whose professional esteem is considerably
lower than it should be. Unlike other skilled professionals,
designers are viewed as outsiders of uncertain prestige, and are
frequently excluded from participation in business enterprises
except in a narrowly circumscribed, post hoc context. A
consideration of principles would suggest that a skilled designer
should be present throughout a development project, to facilitate
cohesion and effectiveness of planning and execution. Instead,
designers are often summoned to perform only limited, specific
tasks after managerial and fiscal specialists have already made
crucial decisions—often inefficiently with little or no depth to
their understanding of the dynamics of information and its
consequences. These problems all point to the need for us to
define, and to design, what is meant by “Design.”
Is that a pizza in your pocket, or are you turning in
circles?
This is not a new problem, and it has not persisted because of a
lack of effort to articulate what designers do, and to improve
their professional status. There have been many grand efforts in
the last few generations: from Moholy-Nagy who explored and
demonstrated the relationships among art, science and technology;
to Ray and Charles Eames who taught us how to integrate the
practice of design with social concerns and sound business values;
to Paul Rand whose taught us the power of clear thinking in problem
solving; to Jay Doblin who taught us the importance rule-based
design systems. Each added eloquence, clarity and commonality.
We thrive on change and our ability to project its effects in
the context of our work. And yet we are unable to build a viable
profession using these same principles. Appreciation and
understanding of structure are always necessary for a successful
design practice, yet we are unable build a structure for our own
profession. To some designers it feels like some kind of restraint,
a compromise. To others, staying focused and sticking with a set of
values in a design practice is counter-intuitive. This perpetuates
the lack of focus in our profession, even when compelling,
substantial answers exist.
There has clearly been a steady decline in the design profession
for over 30 years, and the source of that decline is the
profession's intractable stasis. We are unchanged professionals in
a changing professional climate: clutching at old idols while
failing to create new offerings, failing to reinvent and
reinvigorate the practice when needed, failing to inculcate a
professional culture that is accessible and fair.
In the 1960s and 1970s, designers pioneered ideas and
reconfigured their services in response to market needs and a
refreshingly energized zeitgeist. The Medium Was the Message,
Marshall McLuhan was viewed with lucrative respect as the guru of
the communications revolution and firms like Unimark, Doblin Group,
Landor, and Siegle and Gale distinguished themselves in the
emerging modern marketplace by reconfiguring their practice not
only with offerings, but also with specialists who were not
traditionally associated with design. Ethnographers, language
experts, cyberneticists, futurists and alternative media experts
were added to the mix. There was a constant pushing of the envelope
as to what a design practice ought to be. Great design programs and
institutions and best practices came out of that—and back then
design had a seat at the management table.
In the ensuing years, the deadening effect of social turmoil
followed by stagnation and, later, the sheer volume of work created
by waves of economic expansion engendered an environment of
complacency. Designers increasingly just scrubbed and buffed what
they already had for each successive project and client. They added
more bells and whistles as was required by their clients, and
chimed all the way to the bank. Yes, the medium in which we deliver
design has changed, but designers have offered few new insights or
value to clients.
Think about it. The way we run our businesses now is no
different than it was 30 years ago. It's like a fast-food take out
service: we get an order; we discuss the assignment; we go back to
our studios and perform our magic; we return to our clients with
three choices. Given the myriad delivery options, why is it three
choices? Why not 10? Why not just one? The most appropriate one?
The fundamental model of design consulting practice has lost its
relevance and become another revenue-focused exercise in
consumption. Case in point: Last year The New York Times Magazine
devoted an entire issue to “design.” Not one article among the 20
or so was devoted to graphic design or information design.
Time to change
For all its discomfort, the current economic climate is a blessing.
It is a wake-up call to us as a profession to confront the inner
decline that has taken hold of us, which was masked by the
overcaffeinated economy. We are now faced with the issues we have
artfully managed to avoid dealing with for years—issues of destiny
and the future of ourselves and our profession; of relevance and
influence; of inventing new services and values in the business,
social and cultural realms.
Currently, we spend way too much time as professionals
explaining—often in contradictory terms—what it is that we do. The
value of design is defined in thousands of different conversations
in as many different individual vocabularies. While these views are
doubtless sincere, they would be much more valuable if they were
expressed in the context of a shared professional vocabulary and
ethos. If every physician made up his own set of definitions and
beliefs about anatomy and disease on an improvised basis, the
medical profession would still be in the Dark Ages. Yet the design
profession functions as if each individual designer is selling his
or her services in some sort of terminological vacuum, with nothing
more substantial than his or her personal charisma and taste to
serve as the foundation for vast edifices of public influence.
Our basic challenge is to professionalize the profession. The
slow economy, and the increasingly nasty atmosphere of the social
sphere, are incontestable signals that we need to stop sitting on
our hands, get our noses out of our institutional feedbags and our
emotions away from our personal melodramas, and start thinking long
and hard about what sort of world we want to live in, about what we
could be doing with our skills, about the causal relationship
between our personal integrity and the way we make our living.
Designers exercise immense unacknowledged control over the public
discourse; we need not be unanimous in our opinions and our aims to
begin exercising that control more purposefully, each in his or her
own way. A shared sense of seriousness and idealism, however
differently expressed, would go a long way toward remedying the
disjointed, undefined slackness of our professional culture, and
would unquestionably serve to enhance the prestige and influence of
the field.
Designers do have one thing in common: they agree that clients
don't understand us or appreciate our vision. We have been slow to
learn that we are part of that problem. We can design a chart that
explains what we want to communicate, but are miffed when clients
don't get it. We designers need to improve our communication skills
if we expect clients to pay us to solve their communication needs.
And face it: we are out of practice.
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