Design Power

I think that theres an enormous opportunity for designers and design educators to promote social change. Creative for a cause is an organization that promotes social responsibility in design. There are a ton of links to 'role models' and case studies- people and design firms who are using their power to make change.

I think people are fundamentally decent, but I don't feel that we are naturally compatible with one another. With modern technology moving forward at such a pace, the ethics of interaction are not keeping up.

Living in a city as multicultural as Toronto has give me a strong sense of how people perceive one another through filters, only seeing what they perceive to be negative qualities. I am a strong supporter of what the Dalai Lama calls 'a need for a Secular System of Ethics' that is non-theistic in nature.

So, As a designer I hope to promote decency and respect between people and a shift from seeing the world from the inside out to seeing it from the outside in. Change can only occur within, thus we should use our considerable communication skills to share what we know and provoke others to do the same.

Challenging the Standard Format of Modern Communication

Yes! This is exactly it! Check out these remarkable information design pieces. As I have been working on my own theories of design in my college studies, I cant help but recognize an excellent example of how design can remove the 'visio-rhetorical subtext' from something as commonplace as the news.

While I was drifting in the blogosphere I happened to stumble upon university student David Bowker's website, Designing the News. He has taken the text of various newspapers, dissected them, and reinterpereted them as the visual content of his designs.

I think this is a innovative way of thinking about distributing information. He has interpreted the text of one full week of the guardian and based a series of visuals and information graphics. I think this piece is an excellent example of how challenging the standard format of modern communication can produce such provocative and inspired designs.

Writing as Design

While Graphic design concerns itself predominantly with visualization, at its heart lays a concept or idea that can(and should) be expressed with words.

As we can all appreciate, writing is a form of design because both methods of expression aim to communicate a message to the viewer. On one hand you can say that writing is design because of the way we edit and revise ourselves until we have expressed ourselves clearly. On the other hand, design is writing because both are visual representations of the thoughts of the designer.

I often find that my best designs come from concepts that I can express to myself in less than 50 words. Abbreviating my concepts in such a way keeps me in check so that my concepts will make sense to other people and not just myself. I keep a small journal in my pocket or knapsack at all times. When I travel by public transit, I find that I am too self-conscious to sit and draw, so my notebook is where I do the majority of my brainstorming.