I did an interview the other week with Louise Campbell who is lovely, wonderful and had very interesting things to say about where design is today and where it should (and shouldn't) be going. The interview will be online soon and I'll post the link but she said one thing that really stuck me. She said that intangible design—all these new forms of design that doesn't always produce physical objects—isn't really design at all or at least it should be called something else.
She almost convinced me. And then I thought about the birth of modern art and the tedious (and ongoing) debate about whether it's art or not. Now think about the newer forms of design, of how people are designing service interactions or systems that don't result in a physical thing. Is it really that different? You could argue, as Louise does, that we need to call it something else or you could expand your sense of what design is, in just the same way that we've had to expand our sense of what art is or could be. I must admit that I'm torn.
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