The developing world’s rapidly growing middle class, which includes about two billion people in a dozen emerging economies, spends $6.9 trillion a year. McKinsey research suggests that, during the next decade, their annual spending will rise to $20 trillion, a very big market indeed—twice current US consumption, in fact.
Such consumers will give early winners in the consumer product sector a chance to gain lasting advantages. Consider what happened in Europe and the United States at similar points in their development: in 17 product categories, McKinsey found that the 1925 US market leader remained the number-one or number-two player for the rest of the century. These companies include Kraft Foods (Nabisco), in biscuits; Del Monte, in canned fruit; and Wrigley, in chewing gum. To learn more, read “Capturing the world’s emerging middle class” (July 2010).
Grant Crossley, CEO of The Creative Leadership Forum interviews Jonathan Sceats, an iconic Australian Designer of optical frames and sunglasses about the world of design and fashion, with reference to his original plan to bring 100 designers from around the world to Australia and have them advise businesses on designing the aesthetics of products
Earlier this spring, manufacturers and designers from all over the world were shipping their wares to Milan to prepare for the Salone del Mobile. Anybody involved in design knows this is the most important rendezvous of the year—or at least it used to be, when design meant mostly furniture and objects. Designers anticipate meeting new talent and inspiration; they seek out curators, writers, teachers, students, and, of course, each other—this is a chance to meet with their peers and trade war stories. It’s hard to tell in advance whether Milan will be blooming with wisteria or gray, rainy, and dreary at this time of year, but the event is inevitably alive with the sound of design. The Salone is to design what Cannes is to film: the most useful and most productive yearly trade meeting. But is the future of design here?
Milan still represents a big red dot in the geography of design, but design is changing rapidly, and so are its maps. There are myriad forms of design, many of which don’t require movement of materials and artifacts; only curiosity, an internet connection, and the ability to seek, learn, and synthesize from other fields and cultures. These mutants are the future of design and the place to find them is not at big design trade fairs, but rather in interdisciplinary gatherings, pluralistic exchanges and, especially, in certain schools. Programs like the Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London or the Department of Design at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are trying to merge poetry and beauty with advanced technology. A crucial contemporary effort was pioneered, of course, by such groundbreaking centers as the Media Lab at MIT, the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, and the Knowledge Interaction Design Laboratory (KID) at Tokyo University. However, the newer initiatives at RCA and KAIST are attempting an even more daring synthesis of digital media, this time not with art, but rather with design, which was not a priority before (despite what KID’s name might imply).
Kenichi Okada and Christopher Woebken’s Animal Superpowers. Courtesy of the Royal College of Art
Since the industrial revolution ushered in the modern idea of design, different poles have anchored design, attracted designers and intermediaries, and concentrated cultural and technological production. The manufacturing plants themselves, which vertically integrated all aspects of production and marketing from design to distribution, were the first. The great Josiah Wedgwood, whose groundbreaking 18th-century company was recently sold and is in danger of being obliterated, is the archetype of such a manufacturer. This model persisted until after World War II, when the poles began to shift. Companies then began to subcontract most of the actual construction, while they continued to handle the pre- and post-production phases themselves. This is still the model used by either very big companies such as Herman Miller or Steelcase, or smaller companies producing objects in different materials, each of which requires dedicated plants and technologies. Even in that context, however, the geography of design shifted. Whereas subcontractors once tended to be located in specific areas such as Michigan, California, or north of Milan, today they are spread all over the world.
Just as the landscape of manufacturing has changed, so has the conference scene. Milan’s Solone has been joined on the map by a number of fairs and salons that make up smaller red dots, including London (in September), Tokyo and Kortrijk, Belgium (in October), Paris and Cologne (January), and Berlin and New York (May). Several opportunities now exist for people to meet and do business, and new forms of design that have, for instance, multimedia and interfaces as their focus, have entered the mix. Other gatherings not traditionally considered “design,” such as Ars Electronica in Linz or TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Monterey, have begun competing for designers’ attention and money.
Moreover, the tough financial situation and dwindling travel funds; the increasing number of resources and opportunities available online; the ease of movement from digital design to digital production that renders prototyping almost unnecessary until the moment of distribution; the shrinking of the luxury industry, where much of this type of design resides; the increased sensitivity to the footprint caused by air travel; and especially the massive shift of the design profession from making things to proposing models, visualizing complexity, and building scenarios, are all working together to further endanger this latest design world map. What is important now is the production of ideas: The poles have become lighter and more immaterial, having rid themselves of much of the baggage of material production. The geography of design has transformed; systems are now built around schools rather than industry.
Design education’s path since the second half of the 19th century is a fascinating and rather unexplored subject. That may be a result of the protean definition of design—that vague noun always in need of a modifier to make complete cultural sense, whether it is “graphic,” “furniture,” “automotive,” or “fashion.” Moreover, examples of schools entirely devoted to design are rare, as design often figures as a division within schools devoted to the arts or, as with polytechnic schools, to architecture and engineering. The best contemporary design schools are the most important centers for the production of ideas, having earned preeminence over the R&D departments of corporations and other think tanks by progressively shedding the focus on the immediate production of finite artifacts to privilege experimentation. As a result, they usually flourish where students and teachers can find interdisciplinarity and pluralism, in areas with a strong cultural identity—be it the arts, engineering, architecture, technology, craft, or in any other discipline from which designers draw on a daily basis—that have connections and access to other cultural poles, such as departments of universities, museums, galleries, and so on. Along with KAIST and the RCA and several other institutes in London—always a great design incubator— many vibrant schools have created new centers of design gravity around the world, from Eindhoven’s Design Academy in Holland, to Bezalel in Jerusalem.
The dismantling of a static geography of design is not over yet, however. As the forever far-sighted Neil Gershenfeld explained previously in Seed (Is MIT Obsolete?), the system of schools and other educational institutions is becoming wider and more open. It will hopefully foster the development of identity and personality, the ultimate pointillistic and open-source destination of the design trajectory.
Hands Up Part 1: "How Creative are You?" . Does school kill creativity? Do people lose creative ability over time, and is our education system the culprit? Find out for yourself in this fascinating video... as children get older, they often see themselves as less creative. Andrew Grant and Gaia Grant went back to school to find out if children have any ideas on how adults can become more creative. They were not surprised to discover that their findings correlated with the latest research from Harvard.
Toyota and Japanese research foundation RIKEN have teamed up to create a revolutionary wheelchair steered by mind control. This remarkable development is one of the first practical uses of EEG (Electro-encephalogram) signals.
Designed for people with severe disabilities, the Toyota/RIKEN wheelchair is fitted with an EEG detector in the form of a electrode array skull cap, a cheek puff detector and a display that assists with control. To turn left, right and move forward, the driver simply thinks about the movement and the wheelchair instantly and seamlessly responds. To stop the wheelchair, the driver puffs his/her cheek. A detector on the face picks up the signal and immediately stops the wheelchair.
As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set.
You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.
Visualization got a big boost during the political season from newspapers and networks. On March 24, CNN aired what it claimed was the largest ever tag cloud composed from President Obama's press conference that day.
If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.
Visualization has been used prominently, and to dazzling effect, at The New York Time s , where a collaboration of art directors and programmers turns masses of data into intuitive displays, like the interactive map of the swine virus shown above.
Another example: the Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system
Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnishings) and helps create efficient new forms of buildings, food distribution and transportation.
For example, it's likely that New York and other major U.S. cities will experiment with systems that monitor traffic patterns in real time and manage the use of lanes and access accordingly. A project like that would hinge on our ability to map patterns as they happen, along with the alternatives and consequences. It's a big undertaking, but the benefits are considerable: In Stockholm a system that tracks the movement of every car has reduced carbon emissions by 25%.
Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.
You might think of visualization as the antithesis of Power Point, which sometimes seems to make us dumber. Six years ago, Edward Tufte, a Big Thinker in the field of information graphics, issued a 28-page pamphlet that dumped on Power Point as "a faux analysis" that "turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Visualization does the opposite: it reflects the complexity of the world in simple terms. It is a window onto the world, in all its digital complexity. Though of course data can be skewed in deceitful and insidious ways.
Visualization isn't just for RISD graduates. You can create your own word clouds at a new site called Wordle. Paste in a piece of text or enter a URL and Wordle creates a cloud of the most frequently occurring words.
As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set.
You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.
Visualisation got a big boost during the political season from newspapers and networks. On March 24, CNN aired what it claimed was the largest ever tag cloud composed from President Obama's press conference that day.
If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.
Visualization has been used prominently, and to dazzling effect, at The New York Time s , where a collaboration of art directors and programmers turns masses of data into intuitive displays, like the interactive map of the swine virus shown above.
Another example: the Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system.
Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnishings) and helps create efficient new forms of buildings, food distribution and transportation.
For example, it's likely that New York and other major U.S. cities will experiment with systems that monitor traffic patterns in real time and manage the use of lanes and access accordingly. A project like that would hinge on our ability to map patterns as they happen, along with the alternatives and consequences. It's a big undertaking, but the benefits are considerable: In Stockholm a system that tracks the movement of every car has reduced carbon emissions by 25%.
Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.
You might think of visualization as the antithesis of Power Point, which sometimes seems to make us dumber. Six years ago, Edward Tufte, a Big Thinker in the field of information graphics, issued a 28-page pamphlet that dumped on Power Point as "a faux analysis" that "turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Visualization does the opposite: it reflects the complexity of the world in simple terms. It is a window onto the world, in all its digital complexity. Though of course data can be skewed in deceitful and insidious ways.
Visualization isn't just for RISD graduates. You can create your own word clouds at a new site called Wordle. Paste in a piece of text or enter a URL and Wordle creates a cloud of the most frequently occurring words.
