I had the pleasure of stumbling across Cheryl Heller’s essay Where Design is Going, and How to be There on the AIGA.org website.
http://www.aiga.org/where-design-is-going-and-how-to-be-there
Heller writes a beautiful article about the noticeably prominent shifts with in the design world. Most importantly she references a topic that was new to me before I started taking this course – design thinking – siting an example of TED fellow, Juliette LaMontagne project where she recruits college aged students of various professions, gives them a few courses in design thinking and “turns them loose to design products for developing communities.”
The process of designing for good has been around for quite a while, but the motion of design thinking and the reality that most designers (not all will follow) will start to think of this as a forefront of ideology for their design careers. Heller quotes very elegantly that designers have an identity crisis. “To be a professional designer in this enabled world, we must reinvent what it means to be a professional designer. Changes present opportunities. Disruptions create openings that are potentially better, bigger and more relevant.”
Designers in today’s age must be able to adapt, move on with the current technologies and use it for the better part of design, not to get lazy and use programs to slap text, font, color and bad filters in an effort to create cheap design. Designers must not only know how to create and communicate, but must be problem solvers, strategists, know their client’s audience better than the client and prove that they are worth the money and energy spent. Designers must be creators not just executors.
Heller’s list of “How To Do It” what very nice to read and gives a nice set of fundamentals to re-read from time to time to help remind us that “Design has the potential to be the single most powerful, relevant and restorative process for change know to humankind.”
(All Quotations are from Heller’s article attached above.)