Can Anyone Be A Designer? – Guest Article by Matt Sinclair (Part 2/2)
Last week we posted the first part of Matt Sinclair’s guest article treating the question if anyone can be a designer. A (pretty controversial) question mass customizers and user co-creation enablers are facing regularly…
Part 2:
This opinion, that design isn’t actually that difficult, is one that understandably raises the hackles of design professionals. On a recent thread on Core77, a website and forum for industrial designers, one poster insisted that most design is much, much simpler than gourmet cooking. That sparked off a whole debate, much of it quite disparaging, about consumers who ‘self-design’ products. Some of the comments included:
A small percentage of consumers may want to choose colors on their sneakers, or push and pull a few points on a nurb surface for a cell phone, but you comment comes off as pretty ignorant as to what design actually is.
The rapid prototyping machine in many ways is no different than the hot glue gun, it allows crafters to exercise their wimsy and their perspective, some of which is good, most horrid.
Myspace is a perfect example of what happens when you put design into the hands of everyone. A huge percentage of the pages on myspace are unusable/unreadable. Personal fabrication will be no different… on balance… a big, ugly mess.
It comes down to this, 75% of people are herd beasts, and buy what others in their social groups have/want.
The way these comments are so dismissive of consumers-as-designers to a large extent demonstrates the degree to which professional designers feel their work is misunderstood. In the field of mass customisation this is also very common, sites such as NikeID (‘toolkits’ in the mass customisation jargon), are regularly referred to as offering consumers the opportunity to design their own products. Andrew Keen picks up on this in his arguments in the Fast Company article:
The consequence of this design democracy is an ugly spectacle of deep purples and electric oranges. It’s a culture of me-me-me: my hideously personalized car, my hideously personalized sofa, my hideously personalized house. It’s that fat woman in the tight dress that only exaggerates her obesity. It’s that loud pick-up truck with the tinted windows and the tastelessly sexualized exhaust pipe.
An ugly spectacle or a design classic? Phantasy Landscape
by Verner Panton
I sense some faux outrage here. But anyway, the question is, whose ugliness? If Wallpaper magazine was insisting deep purple and electric orange were cool, would Keen pick another example? What’s being described here is quite clearly taste, not design. And those who are most disturbed by consumers exhibiting their own choices are always those who consider themselves arbiters of ‘good’ taste, the people who see their own influence waning as consumers increasingly make decisions for themselves.
In the end, the question of whether anyone can be a designer comes down to the way in which design is defined. Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. Consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb – something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it.
New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping.
About the Author:
Matt Sinclair graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1995 with a Masters Degree in Industrial Design Engineering. He worked as part of Nokia’s design team for eight years, first in the UK and later in Finland, before leaving to set up his own consultancy at the end of 2003. Matt Sinclair Design specialises in consumer electronics design and past clients include Benefon, EADS, Nokia, Nordic ID and Siemens. In 2007 Matt began a PhD at Loughborough University, researching how rapid manufacturing technologies will redefine the industrial design process, and the future role of the consumer within product creation; he writes about this work at http://no-retro.com/.
