GK Patter from NextD contacted me recently to add my 2 cents to the discussion which has been brought up by a speech of Bruce Nussbaum at Parsons recently. I didn’t do so mainly because I’m not a trained designer and Nussbaum has been mainly attacking design/designer in his piece; accordingly I didn’t feel directly affected by his words. While the public discussion seems to continue let me add some of my observations.
However first of all I’d like to point you to GK’s PDF with statements of 50 selected voices from the design industry who commented/responded to Nussbaum’s speech which he has posted as a blog entry in his NussbaumOnDesign Blog. And to quote GK directly:
“Design is a community of communities in motion, as GK VanPatter likes to say. It is not a singular motion, but rather many motions at various speeds and numerous directions. It is an exciting time as design is emerging into new territories. The process of continuously designing design is complicated and messy, but one that designers must absolutely be involved in. We hope you enjoy “Beautiful Diversion.”
After all I think this sort and format of response is quite smart and powerful since once the “hype” is over I will for sure refer back to a PDF rather than the comments section of Nussbaum’s blog.
Anyway I will not bother you with another iteration of arguments on the whole piece and I think that both perspectives Nussbaum’s as well as GK’s piece present valuable thoughts, ideas, opinions. However while talking about “hype” I must say that I get more and more annoyed by Nussbaum’s throwing in & out of (sometimes? often?) half baked ideas. The day before yesterday it has been “Innovation”, yesterday it has been “India” today it’s “Designers Suck” and the next topic “Sustainability” is already waving around the corner. By the same token it’s funny to browse the according comments and their addressors. Very often for me it looks as if they’ve simply been waiting for an opportunity to passively comment to “Master Bruce” and the BusinessWeek platform instead of pro-actively articulating their ideas at the various other blogs and platforms around. Maybe I’m overstretching the purpose of blogs here, but I miss some sort of “sustainability in attitude or mindset (Haltung)” especially for blogs published under the brand of renowned newspapers & magazines.
The case I’m trying to describe here somehow reminds me of kids (and I clearly include myself here as well) who are attracted by a new toy and play with it for the next couple of hours. Then as the first hype is gone very often the toy lands in the corner with the “other toys” described above (Innovation, India, Designers Suck, Sustainability).
Is this an issue of culture, media, people or simply my very own (myopic?) perception? I don’t know …
