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

Design 2.0

The phrase “Web 2.0” refers to the rise of social media over the past four or five years, in which users post their own content as well as shaping the way existing content is viewed through commenting, voting, rating, tagging, and other forms of interaction.

Blogging is a big part of this. Most people are familiar now with blogs as on-line diaries or informal mouthpieces for journalists and commentators. But blogging is a design tool as well as a genre of writing and publishing. It’s seeping into the design process.

For example, this Web site for Design Life Now is created with Textpattern, free software designed for building blogs as well as for making more general-purpose sites. The site was designed by Bill Berry, Cooper-Hewitt’s in-house Web designer. By using “bloggish” software, Bill could allow curators like myself to upload content directly to the site while he focused on the visual design and information structure. We didn’t want the site to look like a blog, so Bill took out tell-tell signs like time stamps after every article.

More and more design processes are heading in this direction. Throughout the Design Life Now exhibition, you’ll see examples of what I call Design 2.0: participatory design processes that invite users into the game. For example, Natalie Jermijenko works with kids to reverse-engineer robot toys, turning them into pollution-sensing green machines. Processing is an open-source computer language for visual artists; Processing come alive as people around the world put it to use. Blik creates removable graphics for people to arrange on their own walls in their own way. Whether physical or digital, these are all examples of Design 2.0: design for the people, made with the people.

Indie Publishing

One of the themes running through Design Life Now is the opening up of media to everyday citizens. There’s been an explosion of “social media”—Web sites that allow people to build communities and talk with each other on-line. (Blogs like this are one example.)

This communications revolution is affecting print as well digital media. Fueled by the possibility of on-line distribution, more and more authors are taking the plunge and publishing their own books. Self-publishing used to be denigrated as “vanity press,” but a new generation would rather call it “independent.” Self-published books are ready to take their place alongside indie music, film, theater, and more.

On January 11, the museum is running a program on “Indie Publishing.” The event is hosted by myself and Nicholas Blechman, the Triennial-featured designer who created Empire, the acclaimed visual anthology in which some of the world’s most influential graphic artists and writers express collective outrage against the current state of international affairs.

Nicholas and I will talk about how to start building your own publishing “empire,” one page at a time. From making a homemade zine to hand out to your friends to producing a hardcover book that you can sell on line, ordinary citizens can take a shot at publishing using commonly available resources.

The event is pretty much booked to capacity at this point, but we’ll follow up here with links to tools and resources, and an assessment of how the evening went.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about publishing. We’re at a moment in time when authors want to try their hand at graphic design. (Warning: there’s a learning curve.) Yet the opportunity is there for designers, too: more and more of us want to become authors, so the new media economy can work for us, too! Is indie publishing a threat to professional standards, or a chance hear from new voices?

Social Life

  • By: Ellen Lupton
  • | Monday December 18, 2006
  • | 4 Comment(s)

Many people complain that technology is isolating people from their fellow humans. I disagree. E-mail, cell phones, FedEx, Blackberries, and other systems are keeping people more in touch than ever. Indeed, many of us are expected to be “reachable” 24/7.

One of the themes of Design Life Now is how design brings people together, through technologies such as blogging (SpeakUp), public spaces such as libraries (OMA), software languages that are free and open source (Processing), furniture that encourages collaboration (Herman Miller), and publications that promote an inclusive, participatory, D.I.Y. design culture (ReadyMade and Make).

We’d like to hear how design and technology are affecting your social life. Compared to three years ago, do you have more more opportunities to interact with people (physically or virtually), or do you feel more isolated and cut off? Do you enjoy using public spaces to work or to meet people, or do you prefer to be at home or in another private space? What makes a public or private space amenable to collaboration and conversation?

Discipline Convergence

Over the last three years, I have been seeing more convergence between various design disciplines. ReadyMade, Make, and Howtoons are using graphic design to communicate new do-it-yourself design philosophies. Companies like Blik are creating products that are graphics (and graphics that are products).

Designers are producing tools and materials as well as end products. Casey Reas and Ben Fry, creators of Processing, are making software for other artists to use, while the bloggers at SpeakUp have created a social space for designers. The creators of Sensitile and Panelite are making materials to be implemented by other architects and designers.

We’d love to hear how designers from various fields see their disciplines changing.