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"objectified", starring the top industrial designers.


i anticipate that this movie will bring a whole new light to industrial design, and appreciation for the products around us. i feel that it will have more impact than "helvetica". i'm definitely going to watch this... makes me feel invigorated.

i've read a ton of articles recently about how innovation is dead, and how 2009 will be one of the biggest years for design. all designers will have to think even harder about things that matter to people and our culture. is making it pretty enough? making it cheaper better? or do we start thinking about broader questions like, "does this improve the quality of life for this person?"

i'm really curious to see what jonathan ive (senior vp of design at apple, and designer of the original imac and ipod) has to say. i also am really curious to what karim rashid is up to... considering that i was accepted for an internship to work for them in NYC. (unfortunately, i didn't take the offer b/c it was 3 months without pay. damn, i should have done it at the time).

ps. check this article out...
Design is a mess
The problem is that design is pretty much a mess. Just try and make sense of the range of the terms floating around out there: user-centered design, eco-design, design for the other 90%, universal design, sustainable design, interrogative design, task-centered design, reflective design, design for well-being, critical design, speculative design, speculative re-design, emotional design, socially-responsible design, green design, conceptual design, concept design, slow design, dissident design, inclusive design, radical design, design for need, environmental design, contextual design, and transformative design.

Without a compelling, indeed, taxonomic, way of organizing design activity, we are selling ourselves short; we not only have difficulty understanding the profession ourselves, but also in communicating to the world our potency, range, and potential impact. In the end, we seem scattered and "designy"—in a less-than-flattering sense of the word.

As academics responsible for making sense of this jumble for our students then, we feel like those professional bic-a-brac organizers you see on daytime talk shows, confronting the tumult of someone's bloated car garage. So after some long days and a dumpster-load of capabilities lists, here we present everything neatly ordered onto 4 shelving units. Behold the Design Garage, a categorizing of designed-object activity into four primary fields: Commercial Design, Responsible Design, Experimental Design, and Discursive Design. Let's take a closer look at each, focusing on the drivers, criteria for success, and primary intents for each:

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