I have never really, really thought about the concept of design; who made it up, how did they do it, or where it happened. It’s strange because I’ve known I wanted to be in graphic design for the past 5 years, yet it never even occurred to me there was this whole backstory. I didn’t know there was an era in which creativity was at war with industry, let alone that there was an Arts and Crafts movement.
Reading this selection from Kenya Hara’s Designing Design forced me to realize that design is so much more than pixels on a screen. I never considered certain things to be products of creative design, but literally everything around me right now was designed by a creative human mind attempting to catch the appeal of another human. This reading takes you through the timeline of design: from complex furniture to the arabesque walls of the Taj Mahal to airplane seats.
High Concept, High Touch from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind makes me hopeful for the future, but not mine in particular. It’s astounding that more people have jobs in the arts and entertainment industries than lawyers and accountants. This sounds extremely pessimistic coming from someone who hopes for a future career in graphic design, but I think it’ll be a while before the right brainers “rule the future” over the logical, analytical thinking left brainers.
