Hasta La Ideas

pimg alt=”tony-hayward.jpg” src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/tony-hayward.jpg” width=”468″ height=”323″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p

pemBP CEO Tony Hayward in happier days/em/p

pThe other day as I sat in a hotel room in Milwaukee watching Anderson Cooper grow more and more telegenically indignant about the BP oil spill, I found my thoughts returning once again to a growing list of recent governmental and institutional failings. The entries on the list are familiar to us all: the housing bust, the credit crises, the ensuing job losses and now, the apparent lack of oversight that may well have led to the Deepwater Horizon fiasco. The plot twists have become so common over the past two years that they threaten to lose their ability to shock and alarm us. You know the story: large federally regulated industry makes naughty with oversight body leading to mayhem and merry making at the taxpayer’s expense. Sitting there in Wisconsin, a flickering thought tripped me up; at the heart of this series of catastrophes might well lay the design brief for the next 50 years: Empowering, leveraging and generally flat out exploiting community to effect social and economic change./p

pAttribute it to social media, dead simple organization or maker culture writ large, but after years of anemic political engagement, citizenry and social engagement are back in fashion. This recent turn of events couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Not for society at large or for design as a profession. Throughout the economic downturn, designers used their newfound idle time to ponder the future focus of their profession, to reassess what it was they were so doggedly pursuing with design, not to mention ‘within’ design. Case and point: Project H. Drawing a deep contemplative breath, a generation of designers looked up from their monitors and found something lacking. Entrepreneur? Design Auteur? Corporate advocate? There were, it seemed, too few options on offer. In a world of increasing complexity, mounting uncertainty and expanding individual possibility, the formal paths forward appeared perversely antiquated. One could attribute this realization to the perennial impatience of design, or perhaps the Millennial workforce’s penchant for meaning in their workmdash;but maybe it just comes down to simple economics: if you’re going to ask someone to work twice as hard for half the job security, they may well surprise you by asking for something in return. /pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/coordinating_disaffection_a_design_challenge_worth_considering_16809.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5hgw0EXDlEG9cV8i3JeVcIt4ss8/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5hgw0EXDlEG9cV8i3JeVcIt4ss8/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5hgw0EXDlEG9cV8i3JeVcIt4ss8/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5hgw0EXDlEG9cV8i3JeVcIt4ss8/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p