In less than three weeks thousands of designers will ascend upon Denver to gather, chatter and lather about our profession at the 2007 AIGA National Design Conference, Next. Unlike 2005’s ambiguously titled Design, or 2003’s ambitiously titled The Power of Design, this year’s edition is decidedly clear(er) on what it will offer: “Explore the value of design and seek to answer the question: what’s next?”. A tall order for sure, and a worthy topic for musing but, perhaps, a rather incongruous theme in contrast to the nature of graphic designers?
The theme for the conference will serve, in part, as a vessel to deliver the results of AIGA’s Defining the Designer of 2015 initiative in partnership with Adobe that was launched “to define the professional requirements of the designer of 2015 — to forecast the needs, skills and roles of the designer of the future.” (You can hear about the findings on Saturday’s 2:15 affinity session from Adobe’s Joan Bodensteiner and Ric Grefé, executive director of the AIGA). “Designers are the intermediaries between information and understanding,” writes Grefé in an accompanying editorial to the initiative, “And yet, there is a vulnerability to this vision — they can react to what is asked of them, but they do not always anticipate their own future as clearly.” What Grefé sees as vulnerability, I see as our strongest asset: Reaction.
Of course, on paper, Proactive reads better than Reactive, but as a skill that designers have developed over the decades — fueled by evolving technologies, shifting economies and morphing cultures, and emphasized by the variety of clients, personas and deliverables we deal with from project to project — reaction may be what makes our services, skills and sensibility valuable. As has been made evident over the years, especially as discussed early on here at Speak Up, defining, prescribing (and even proscribing) what graphic design is and what graphic designers do is a prohibitive endeavor, especially if consensus is what one is after… “The desired outcome of the Designer of 2015 initiative is to define about six general types of designers who will be needed to address communication design problems in the collaborative environment of 2015.”
With or without definitions, graphic designers — maybe I should make the distinction, successful graphic designers (and we all know what success in design entails) — have survived, and thrived, dandily since the heady corporate days of the 60s and 70s and into the turbulent 90s and early 00s, simply by adapting and reacting to client needs, market demands and social expectations based on their knowledge of design principles (typography, language, composition, delivery, etc.) coupled with their own personal understanding of business and culture — reacting to these variables by producing context-appropriate, time-sensitive, zeitgeist-specific solutions that are visually engaging… Hopefully. As designers, we draw from what is happening around us at the moment, and based on what has come before it, keeping pace with the information that everybody is experiencing at the time… Reacting. This should not be a bad word for designers. It should be embraced.
Despite being reluctant to forecasting an irremediably unpredictable set of “needs, skills and roles of the designer of the future”, I’m eager, as I am every two years, to hear what designers (on the big stage, the little stages and outside the restrooms) are doing and thinking — whether for the now, or for the Next.
[Disclosure: I was on the advisory committee for Next. My views, as always, are my own. No one asked me to write anything about it.]
"initiative in partnership with Adobe that was launched “to define the professional requirements of the designer of 2015"
Surprisingly, it was determined that the professional requirements that are necessary are a fully licensed copy of Adobe CS12 and the Font Folio CD.
On Sep.26.2007 at 10:26 AM