From IDSA promotion for a seminar
Design is changing…spreading from the studio to the streets!
It’s happening in Portland to a degree that you can’t see YET in the rest of the nation. If the next decade is about local, authentic and personal, Portland is a window into the future. Portland also serves as both the epicenter of the U.S. crafting resurgence and home to many top design-driven companies like Nike, Intel, Ziba and Wieden+Kennedy. That unique combination of creativity is a perfect framework for our debate about DIY Design today and its implications for the future.
Today’s DIYers can create anything, come from anywhere, and find resources and markets for their projects with a mouse click. The implications of this shift for the design professions are potentially massive. The DIY resurgence is causing consumers to question the need for mass production, and by extension, the need for designers.
usethings is exploring this territory and one of the purposes of this weblog is to find a way to express what we do.
In Australia we float in catagories a little – the craft / design connetion is a little stronger in UK design and that is part of our culture. We’ve been working to fit all our concerns together or at least express how they fit. Some of them came up in the Care to Air documentation have a look at the link in that post.
Some of the things we’d like to express in our design and thinking around what we do are: local making, meeting local needs, accesable production methods, traditional skills, solving problems with materials / processes at hand, local energy, local materials, local impacts (waste etc) and hand made (why is it different). We’ll be developing these ideas over the next few years I’m sure.