Hasta La Ideas

Director Gary Hustwit took a break from shooting his latest documentary, Urbanized, which most recently saw him pairing up Norman Foster and Oscar Niemeyer for their first ever meeting and a joint interview, to rally the design troops yesterday on Twitter. While we’re sure that if you’re reading this blog and you’re on Twitter, you already follow Hustwit, but allow us to do a quick recap. Early Tuesday, he posted “Twitter to Design World: Drop Dead. @Twitter kills design category in Who To Follow, still no explanation or fix. #BringBackDesign” That “Who to Follow” is the feature the social media platform launched nearly a year ago, giving advice based on metrics like popularity, category and who you already happened to be following. When asked why their dropping design mattered, Hustwit responded, “Their eliminating the Design category in Who To Follow means fewer new @Twitter users will follow designers & design media.” Questioned by another follower, “Who listens to Twitter’s advice?” the director replied, “Millions of new users. Who To Follow is first place they’re sent & now design isn’t repped.” Twitter, via its creative director Doug Bowman, responded, saying, “Hey Gary, several of us replied to you that we’d look into it, & we are. Tweets like this won’t help move anything faster. ” And of course, because this is an internet where you can see famous people speak to one another, DJ Spooky (another “of course”), responded to Huswit’s call for action, introducing him to a higher up at Twitter and writing, “I think that it will work out.” So we’d assume that, by now, all is well again. Also, we’re sorry if, now all the way at the end of this post, you’d already lit your torches ablaze and were itchin’ for some mobbin’. Does it help any if we say we think the internet is weird?

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