NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Special Issue, April 2007
Beautiful Diversion
balances this instinct but it needs to learn to do so” (Whybrow 2005) Seductive visual emphasis targets the conditioned ‘I want more and I want it now’ instinct and limits our opportunities to form a full sensory gestalt that could balance perceived need with sense. Tough CEOs John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Markets, reputedly has ethical values: ‘Management has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value; therefore any activities that don’t maximize shareholder value are violations of that duty.’ (Mackey 2005) Need I say more? Conclusions ‘Organic’ is supposed to cost more, it takes longer and/or costs more to produce but that’s a ‘slow’ approach to business. Like Woodrow Wilson said: ‘If you want to make enemies, try to change something.’
Gunnar Swanson |
Gunnar Swanson Design Office, United States
Bruce Nussbaum tells us that “blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer” but Macs (or PCs, or, for that matter, typewriters) didn’t make everyone writers. Nussbaum is right about how silly and obnoxious that is, and he’s right on a few other points but his references to designers are about as targeted as if he’d used the phrase “writers and editors.” And writers and editors do suck: They don’t understand this and they don’t do that. The one thing you might expect them to do is to use words well. If Nussbaum thinks that innovation, design, eco-imagination, vision, and banana are pretty much interchangeable and that everyone called “designer” does essentially the same thing then we can only hope that the DYI spirit in design will extend to business writing. He may have something important to tell us. Maybe he should hire a writer so we can figure out just what it is.
Page 13 of 58