I was thinking that I must have been far behind in the design world, when I began to step into a tutorial classes that I will take this semester at Swinburne University. It was my intimate relationship reading cultural studies, media and communication theory wrapping up my final PhD submission. I have not been much involved such industry practice but have been stuck years redoing reading and rewriting. Having said that, I am not completely far away, as it was the discussion that began its spark 5 years ago, rethinking design.
It was the question asked by my lecture in my first week of Master’s class. The question was ‘what is design?’ We came up with our own understanding of design coming from different design practices, and so the conversation about design began. Today, the conversation is still going and growing. I can see that the ‘talking’ years ago in about design, is growing and that much of the conversation has been taken up to ‘doing’. Action, making, doing, researching about design is the process of re-thinking about design, re-defining its roles, strengthening its boundaries and re-involving the action with humanity again has now are part of not only limited to design firm, but also in design education. And it is not only here in Australia, America, Europe but also in Asia. Basically it is the conversation about design around the world. It has been emphasized design conference, design dialogue and also industry practices. A talk by Rick Poynor in his visit to Melbourne June 2009, questioned ‘can graphic design save the world?” engaged in this conversation about rethinking design. This scenario does not happen in a small scale, in fact everywhere around the world designers from different cultural background stood up and make a pledge that design is more than just making everybody happy but also can be part of the action in saving the world (join design can change the world).
This video presentation in AIGA conference by David Butler, a vice president of global design at The Coca-Cola Company provide view about rethinking design. Also another discussion focus on typography design can be read from Rick Poynor’s blog about Rethinking Conceptual Type Design.
This semester I am looking forward to explore how design student view and go through the process of rethinking about design.
Re-thinking design is design in action (Nurul Rahman 2011)