Featured Article: The Value of Design

Time for Change

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.”

— Full article available at AIGA.org