As a creative professional I try to keep loose tabs on how design and creativity are evolving. These past several months have given me a lot to think about. While we’ve just begun to witness the heralded uptick, and concerns still linger over a double dip recession—it’s fair to say the rate of economic deceleration we’ve all been riding these past 18 months seems to be slowing. And throughout it all, while “Innovation” may have been famously interrupted, design hasn’t been. It has kept evolving.
Heading into the recession, two longstanding waves of change were already driving toward disruptive convergence. The first, technology, is already so familiar we generally fail to appreciate just how deeply and profoundly it impacts design. The second, sustainability, while admittedly still a long way from being genuinely understood by design, is just as tirelessly undermining old ways and conventions for ‘doing’. The economic crisis added a third wave to this mix; one which more immediately demanded our attention. With the arrival of economic urgency, these three forces combined to create a veritable perfect storm, precisely the kick in the pants design needed to move beyond the ‘innovation’ rut into which it had fallen. Don’t misread me here, innovation and innovation processes are important—but heading into the down turn, innovation had become a poorly defined term thrown about casually and without consideration. Today, technology, sustainability and a renewed interest in results are conspiring to do more to reinvent Design than any set of factors has in the past twenty years. But what will it mean for Design?
Any design process operating within today’s frugal landscape and endeavoring to produce great work, tends toward three common characteristics: economy, expediency and focus; financial crisis or not, great design criteria for which to strive at any time.
Fast Cheap and Good?
It’s an old design maxim that you can achieve any two of these criteria but never all three. While Cheap and Fast are admittedly not a prescription for GREAT, technology and globalization have brought about changes that undermine the once rock-steady certainty of this assertion. In his September Wired article “The Good Enough Revolution,” Robert Capps explored how the democratization of technology and the proliferation of cheap quality goods is re-scripting our collective understanding of ‘GOOD’. Capp’s article is an interesting read, and while you can argue the dangers and temptations of its central thesis: a world awash in abundant ‘Good Enough’ services and products, the fact remains that technology has significantly altered most playing fields. In today’s marketplace there is little room for the truly bad, a lot of merely good, and persistently precious-little great.
Against this evolving landscape and informed by the lessons of the last several months, I’d like to submit that we reevaluate ‘fast, cheap and good’, suspending disbelief long enough to imagine a design process where fast and cheaper might not only deliver the good, but might just as readily deliver the great. A process where economic and material frugality exerts such persistent pressure that efficiency and expediency become fundamental factors in any design undertaking—informing not only the business of design but also the method of design itself. It’s a potentially controversial position, but it doesn’t need to be. Design, after all, has long championed the merits of simplicity and elegance derived from economy; for the future practice of design, these qualities may just be dramatically less elective.
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