Bruce Nussbaum poses the question "Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?" [NussbaumOnDesign, March 18]. He contends that every one is a designer, performing everyday activities of their choice or volition to make their lives what they would desire it to be, taking decisions to "design their lives". It is indeed true that we are caught up in a constant feedback loop in taking corrective steps to our actions, tweaking our actions to get to our desired goal. This, he says, it what it is to live a life in beta.
More people are playing the role of designer through the tools being offered to them, such as blogs, Myspace, and clothes. He postulates that people want to participate more in the design process of their lives. This essentially means that people want greater power to customize a product to suit themselves.
What the designer will have to now do is build tools and platforms that people can use in order to build customized products to suit their needs through experiential learning and trial and error.
While Nussbaum claims that exceptional design will be done by star designers, my understanding of the article is that most designers will become design managers, utilizing their understanding of the design process and various design domains to provide navigable maps for people to customize products to their liking. This approach is in opposition to the approach of allowing people complete and uncontrolled access to control the design of a product, which even if possible to develop or manufacture, would result in chaos. Creativity is about controlling chaos (Evolvingtrends) Designers provide the controlling mechanism through governing the choices and freedom made available to the customer.
The designer will be involved as much is designing a product as in building tools to enable the design process. Developing a design pathway for a particular product, some thing Dell achieved through its online configuration tool, is one such example. The designer will envision the design possibilities and a tree of all the scenarios in which the design could be utilized in the degrees of freedom for customization in a configuration tool.
An issue that comes up in the democratization of design is who owns the design. It is logical that the consumer using a tool to develop a design would own the end product. However, it is important that design choices that are incompatible or unsafe not be permitted, or else the liability would just as well fall on the designer as the consumer. This may take on the undertones of Big Brother, but it is necessary to limit choices in such situations. Nussbaum mentions sustainability as one issue that should concern designers. (In fact, he urges us as consumers to demand products that are sustainable from designers) . Such considerations can be woven into the design thinking and design tools to limit choices to aid in some thing such as sustainable design that will benefit society at large.
All in all, innovation from the masses is here to stay!