Again I would like to refer to Hannes Treichls Blog Anders/Denken and not because he is Austrian as I am but because of the fact that he raises an issue that haunts me since years: design and designers, »Gestalter« who in general do not work with content. In the majority of the cases they do a decorative job which I think is good enough for mediocre content, sometimes they do a covering-up job - of course, this can also be justified as content is often of fairly low quality. But what rarely happens is a debating approach. I personally think that content and design have to serve each other, have to form a fabric, a democratic approach though.

I just threw out thousands of kilos of designed stuff. I don’t comment on this and I don’t want to blame anybody because it also stands for my own uncertainty about how to tackle the topic. Currently, I am re-conceptualize all biestmilch.com print materials. And we redo our website as well for exactly the same reasons stated below.

The users involvment into content generation, into the doing it yourself design will dethrone designers, and it will change habits of perceptions. Could be an encouraging development, at least I do hope so.

Here some fragments from the original post.

»DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. […] The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer…« BusinessWeek, Editor Bruce Nussbaum in hid Blog.

Design Democracy is the wave of the future. I love this approach, I thing top-down is done, it is bottom-up which counts.

Some quotes:

• People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives.

• People want to be in the design sandbox so you have to figure out
  how to get them in and do design with them. This is a huge challenge.

• The broad new paradigm for design—the paradigm you will all work within for the rest of your lives—is sustainability.

• We need to live the lives we design.

• Our job today as journalists is to curate conversations among
  groups within our audience. […] We design stories with our audience.

• It’s not about the finished story but about the ongoing story.
  It’s the conversation. And since most conversations don’t have a
  conclusion, they are ongoing. We live a life in beta.

So one Big Design Management Challenge is how do you switch gears from designing for to designing with?