About the Museum Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Calendar of Events Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Special Events Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Press
Exhibitions Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Collections Online Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Education Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Visit Cooper-Hewitt Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Join & Support Cooper-Hewitt Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum National Design Awards Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum The Shop at Cooper-Hewitt

Design Blog Design Blog » Design Triennial

Is D.I.Y. Bad for Design?

Viriginia Postrel has a piece on D.I.Y. design in the March/April issue of Print magazine. Postrel is a professional writer, not a designer, whose crossover book The Substance of Style helped convince people in business and cultural institutions that design has something to offer the economy. Her book was directed not at designers, but at the rest of us.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that she celebrates the rise of D.I.Y. design in her piece for Print. Postrel thinks it’s good for designers, as well as for the public at large, that design tools are becoming more available. Here’s how her essay concludes:

“Little of today’s D.I.Y. design is a substitute for the real challenges of professional practice. It’s either routine or purely personal—the equivalent of home-style cooking, not a four-star restaurant meal. We wouldn’t eat better, or appreciate fine cuisine more, if only certified chefs could buy fresh ingredients or use pots and pans. Access to typefaces doesn’t define good graphic design any more than access to a word processor and a dictionary guarantees good writing. The more amateurs do things themselves, the more they develop a refined taste for good professional work—whether in the kitchen or at the design station.”

Read more by Virginia Postrel on her blog, of course.

Are Designers the Enemies of Design?

Design writer Bruce Nussbaum delivered a speech at Parsons a few weeks ago whose controversial refrain was “designers suck.” Read the speech on his Business Week blog. Nussbaum claims that designers are slow to embrace the democratization of design. They still want to keep the “sandbox” to themselves, rather than inviting their clients, users, and audiences in to play with them. Designers are protecting their own egos (and expertise), rather than opening up their way of thinking.

Nussbaum points out that people want to be part of the design processes that define their lives: “With more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation.”

That’s a big theme of this Triennial, which features D.I.Y. renegades such as Make, Readymade, Howtoons, Processing, Blik, Natalie Jeremijenko, Ron Gilad, and many more.

Another theme Nussbaum touches on is the slowness of the design professions to take on a cradle-to-cradle ethos of sustainability. He assaults the beloved iPod, also featured in the Triennial, as falling short of the ideal of long-cycle product design, which allows consumers to open up a product and upgrade it rather than replace it altogether.

Nussbaum calls on us to approach design as a mode of thinking: “Design has evolved from a simple practice to a powerful methodology of Design Thinking that, I believe, can transform society. By that I mean Design, with a capital D, can move beyond fashion, graphics, products, services into education, transportation, economics and politics. Design can become powerful enough to be an approach to life, a philosophy of life. But it can do so only when Design by Ego ends and Design by Conversation begins.”

May the conversation continue!

Design on the Colbert Report

Wow! Stephen Colbert just hosted Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of Make magazine. Check out the clip on designer David Albertson’s Web site. Congratulations to the team at Make (and thanks for keeping a sense of humor about design).

Process This!

On March 8, Ben Fry offer a hands-on workshop at Cooper-Hewitt devoted to Processing, the open-source visual design software that he co-authored. For more information, visit our calendar.

The Processing workshop is part of our “Tech on Your Terms” series, which invites the public to come to the museum and try out various design technologies. Ben’s workshop is our most ambitious in the series. This is a unique opportunity to work with one of the world’s visionary design minds. No previous experience with Processing is necessary.

Why write your own code? Today, people are accustomed to creating all sorts of graphics using commercial software packages—from Photoshop to PowerPoint—that hide the working methods of the computer. Writing your own code allows you to see into how computers think, and to create complex visual effects that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

I’ve been experimenting with Processing in a sophomore design class (with help from my graduate student Yeohyun Ahn). Students were able to generate intriguing graphics using a few lines of computer code.

As you develop more skills, Processing is a great tool for animation and interactive projects involving audio and video input.

What a Mess

  • By: Ellen Lupton
  • | Saturday February 3, 2007
  • | 3 Comment(s)

When creating Design Life Now: National Design Triennial, the curators decided not to organize the exhibition by discipline (graphic design, product design, architecture, and so on), or by theme (green, social, formal, technological, etc). Instead, the show is more like life, where diverse objects and images sit beside each other in loose affiliations. Some rooms in our exhibition focus loosely around a topic, such as medical innovations, large-scale technology projecs, or social media, but by and large, the exhibition likes to mix things up. (The visual flow was determined largely by the exhibition designer, Sandra Wheeler of Matter Practice Architects, working with the curators.)

Not everyone likes the mix. A review in the Architect’s Newspaper, for example, asked, “How do you look at Chip Kidd’s book covers next to Alison Berger’s lamps?” (January 17, 2007).

But I like seeing Chip Kidd’s work near domestic objects (and I like seeing them in our very domestic museum space). In real life, you might find a book in a bookstore with lots of other books, but you can also find a book at home, with tables, lamps, furniture, and many other things.