Hasta La Ideas

We can think of no better person than Julie Lasky, who now helms the smart n’ sustainable Change Observer, to demystify the final years of I.D., the 55-year-old design magazine that was folded last month by increasingly irrational F+W Media. We encourage you to steel yourself before reading “I.D.’s Executioners,” which details her Sisyphean six-year tenure as editor-in-chief of I.D. and as an employee of “a company whose institutional memory is as long as my thumb.”

Imagine going to a hospital and learning from the person holding the scalpel that he really doesn’t see a difference between your hand and your foot; after all, an appendage is an appendage, and a sock can be pulled over any of them. A blogger commenting on Bruce Nussbaum‘s post about I.D.‘s death wondered whether design thinking had been applied in any attempt to keep the magazine going. Don’t make me laugh. Whereas designers spend their days making astute decisions based on the accumulation of facts, I.D.‘s executioners seemed to feel that genuine understanding of their property was too expensive to acquire and finally irrelevant.

Read the full piece on Design Observer.

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