sections of the designer’s concerns, the client’s concerns, and
society’s concerns. The designer
can work with conviction at the
overlap of these concerns: This
is called informed intuition. The
important part here is that the
designer starts with his own set
of subjective concerns and is not
simply a corporate mercenary.
Was the iPhone conceived
through “user observation”?
Doubtful. Designers lead the
public imagination with new
proposals. Designers provide visions of what could be.
Informed design experiments
make sense of modern change
and are risky because they propose new behaviors, not just
cater to observed, existing ones.
more processes and methods,
our work becomes easier to plan
for, and thus easier to buy for
managers.
Q: What is the future of
American design?
Jeremy (IIT): If designers just
design for other designers, we
will end up with an oversupply of beautiful, expensive,
and mostly useless products.
Overvaluing intuition leads to
the star-designer phenomenon,
which is bad for the profession.
When there are a few high-paid
designers who are admired for
their seemingly infallible intuition, we end up with a lower
class of designers left to implement their ideas for much lower
pay. This income distribution
resembles the music industry
and the crack-dealing industry—
new recruits are lured by a
few successful examples but
will likely never achieve a
living wage.
When we create processes
and methods that deemphasize
intuition, we create fewer star
designers. Instead, we create
more designers who can operate
in a competitive, profit-driven
environment alongside marketing and finance folks. With
ative, contrarian point of view
that often leads to great design
innovations. It’s important to
recognize our role in the future
of global design. At the moment,
the U.S. is known for great
brands, great firms, and great
schools. But our position in the
future is not a given. There is
an amazing amount of design
talent being developed in India,
Korea, China, and Taiwan. They
have sent students to our best
schools not to become American
designers, but to go back to their
home countries and improve
both practice and education.
Many of these countries also
have national design policies
and strategies (which we do not,
for better or worse, in the U.S.).
We need to act now, since we do
not want our role to have been
only to educate these competing
national economies; we need to
think about how to partner and
collaborate with them to build
American business.
Scott (Cranbrook): While working at IDEO, I experienced projects that integrated the efforts
of Cranbrook “designers” and IIT
“innovators” within the same
team. It was a friendly balance
of heart and mind, form and
strategy. I think this balanced
approach to design process will
represent the new state-of-the-art in the American profession.
Successful teams will be comfortable with the give and take
between design and innovation.
Understanding the line where
design ends and innovation
begins will be an ongoing question. Experts in both methods
will continue to be in demand.
As “things with attitude” come
to center stage in more markets,
American design will need a
more sophisticated way of discussing connections between
form and attitude to build
meaningful products and brand
stories with a POV. America
needs more laboratories for
experimental thinking and making. As a profession, the “art” of
design must be supported and
encouraged as much as the business of design. Designers with a
sophisticated critical framework
for evaluating form, in all its
complexities, will build a better
American, and global, design.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Product designer and educator
Scott Klinker heads the graduate
3D design program at Cranbrook
Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan, where he also received
his MFA in 1996. He has worked
in-house for IDEO (Palo Alto) and
Sony/Ericsson and later chaired the design program at
the Kanazawa International Design Institute in Japan.
He currently runs Scott Klinker Product Design, developing licensed designs for contract furniture, household goods, and toys, with clients including Steelcase
and Burton Snowboards. In 2006 he was featured as
one of Newsweek’s annual “Design Dozen,” a selection of the best new designers.
Jeremy Alexis is an assistant pro-
fessor and assistant dean at the
IIT Institute of Design. He holds
both a bachelor of architecture
and master of design from the
Illinois Institute of Technology. He
currently teaches the research
and demonstration (yearlong cap-
stone) class, as well as classes on economics and
design, concept evaluation, design decision making,
and problem framing. Before IIT, he worked for
Doblin, Gravity Tank, and Archideas. He has worked
with clients such as Unilever, Motorola, Citibank,
Pfizer, American Express, and Target.
January + February 2009
Jeremy (IIT): I agree with Scott’s
vision of the balanced approach.
We recognize that if we overrationalize the design process,
we will miss out on the cre-
DOI: 10.1145/1456202.1456216
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0100 $5.00