Commercial and industrial design is a fascinating subset of creative endeavor, raising all sorts of relevant issues to the arts and cultural manager. Designers develop complex aesthetic and functional responses to real-world problems, often seeking to engage an audience in their solutions (design is what makes you want a VW Bug over a Honda Civic, or an iPod over another MP3 player).
On-line design magazines like Core 77 offer a great window on the conflicts and solutions of the design world. Like this essay on emotion versus intelligence, where the author states:
Designers may look artistic, but our process is logical. Good design is an objective art — it’s not magic or mystical; designers make real things that actually do things. We solve problems, design stuff for clients, or make our own things to sell to other people. In order to make these things for people, of course, we need a reliable foundation — a shared perception of reality. Our work is based on experiment, hypothesis and testing, and since we are using our talents to make people’s lives easier, more comfortable, richer or more beautiful, we need to inhabit the rational world of physics.
Or this essay exploring ‘why we want things,’ and how we decide which things to want…an obviously important understanding for anyone engaging an audience.
Beyond that, forward-thinking commercial and industrial design offers a wonderful view of how people might think, or work, or play, or behave in the distant future, and how the ‘tools’ of our lives might need to change in response.
Just take a look at Technovelgy.com, a site that explores the ideas/inventions of science fiction writers that are finding a real place in the world. How can you not question your efforts to meaningfully connect your organization to the lives of your audience when you know they may soon be wearing electronic underwear that monitors their heart, or checking the time through a display embedded in their contact lenses, or building their own virtual alter-egos through on-line games.
While we’re all building strategy models on how audiences used to connect to our art and our work, industrial and commercial designers are quietly changing that world in profound ways. And all the while, they’re working at the intersection of utility, perception, aesthetics, and human experience. I’d suggest that’s the same intersection where the cultural manager does his or her work.
In a sense, arts and cultural managers are ‘using our talents to make people’s lives easier, more comfortable, richer or more beautiful,’ too (as long as ‘richer’ includes ‘uneasy,’ ‘challenged,’ and ‘disturbed’).
