NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Special Issue, April 2007
Dr. Richard Buchanan |
Beautiful Diversion
Carnegie Mellon University, United States
Bruce Nussbaum is a good friend of design. As a journalist, he has helped to raise consciousness in the business community about the value of design for enterprise. Now, he is performing another act of friendship, turning toward the design community and asking designers and design educators to think harder about what they are doing. To be honest, there is nothing new in his latest piece, “Are Designers the Enemy of Design?” That is, nothing new unless his readers haven’t been paying attention to the development of design over the past decade. All of the ideas about design democracy, sustainability, conversation as content, the ignorance of some designers about important issues in their own and other fields, the sometimes-arrogant behavior of some designers, and so forth — all of these are already known to thoughtful people in the design community. And Bruce knows this. What he is saying, however, is that not all is well in the house of design. The community needs to move forward in its understanding and attitude. Many of us would agree with him. Our criticisms of the field may be different than his, but we agree that the field can and has to do better. Designers should not take for granted that their continued influence and impact in business and society at large is assured. It is not. Already we see the dilution of design coming in various ways: vague uses of the word, weak substitutes for its meaning. We even see the move among some — not all — business schools to introduce design into their curricula by cherry-picking some of the important methods and tools of design such as prototyping and user research bundled in the theme of innovation. Never mind the ideas and the foundations that in the long run are necessary for successful design. And design schools? They have been slow to recognize the value of research and writing about design — the very activities that have elevated other fields and made their professions sustainable through ongoing conversation. American pragmatism is a wonderful thing, but as in many areas of our national life it seems to work on behalf of ignorance and against sustained conversation. How many articles by designers and design educators display awareness of earlier discussions of their subjects in the literature of the field? How many articles give the impression that their authors are the first to think of an idea, with no reference to significant work by others? Caught up in the hypertrophic enthusiasm of self-promotion and media hunger, there seems to be too little effort to put the story of design together into a coherent narrative for ourselves and for others. Bruce Nussbaum is a good friend of design. But it will take more than journalism and blogs to strengthen the house of design. We have the tools — serious design journals, intelligent and committed professionals, and a new generation of better-educated designers. Now we need the vision and commitment of sustained conversation. Like it or not, Bruce has a point.
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