*Now that I'm in a design school, whenever I see stuff like this it really makes me want to write a short story.
http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20110609/designing-the-future
How did the idea for this program start?
When Steven Heller first approached me about starting a graduate industrial-design program at SVA, my response was, “I don’t know if it would be an ID department, exactly, but it would certainly involve artifacts, their purpose, making, sustainability…” And he said, “Great! Write it up.” But the challenge was to figure out what the landscape for artifacts will be in the year 2014—when we’d graduate the first class. An interaction-design program a few years ago would have principally been about the Web, for example; now it’s a completely different landscape: iPhones, apps, tablets, a mobile revolution.
For now.
Exactly. We don’t know what the next revolutions will be. In product design, we’re seeing an explosion of making, technology, and participants. The return to the hand, the maturing fields of rapid prototyping and manufacturing-on-demand, the number of people who use the tools and vocabulary of design plus the number of designers using the tools and vocabulary of making, hacking, modding, and crafting. It’s an amazing time for the artifact.
I’ve come to believe that designing the process that creates the product is way more important than the object itself.
Well, not just the process, but the ecosystem. I think the old definition of designer-as-problem-solver is a little bit limited: here’s a problem over here; there’s the solution. You solve the problem. Next problem please.
It’s just unbelievably naive. The problem isn’t static. It’s moving. It’s a living organism. It’s fundamentally systemic. To think you can actually simply “solve” it is ridiculous. Rather, you need to negotiate it. What’s also limiting is this notion that designers alone can provide coherent, resilient solutions. It’s a team sport. And it seems to me that today, all design is kind of all design. Certainly there are fundamentals like research and problem framing and iteration, but what’s interesting about artifacts is that they’re a place where several design vectors intersect—the touch points, embodied experiences, participation of the senses beyond the visual.
Artifacts are the props or portals into designed experiences and services—a sort of storytelling device that literally holds your hand through the narrative. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s a better point of departure than a designer waking up and saying, “OK, I’m going to design some stuff today. And if my client is good and my marketing department is really good, we’re going to make hundreds of thousands of this thing. Now, what should we make?” We need to shift the question from “What do we want to make?” to “What do we want to do?” Then, what we make—the products of design—will surface in ways that are truer, more sustainable, and more grounded in rigorous intention. Currently, there’s a lot of creating a thing and then creating a demand for that thing.
You use the word artifact instead of product. Why?
The products of design have really exploded in recent years. It’s everything from a set of instruction cards to a plane interior. It’s custom manufacturing, short runs, ready-mades, mass-produced objects, advocacy campaigns. You have design fiction, speculative objects, design art. And we’re just beginning. People love stuff. Stuff is not going away. But if we agree that we can’t keep making stuff the way that we’re making it—because we’re starting to really understand the systemic consequences of production and consumption—then we also have to agree that we need to stop teaching people to make stuff the way that we’ve been teaching them. That calls for a new program and offers us a new opportunity to try and improve the systems currently in peril—and to ennoble the great things that are happening around us....
