Designers Look for Trouble
What’s Your Problem?

Designers are an odd bunch. No other discipline (professional or otherwise) spends so much time looking for what’s wrong with everything in the world. If it wasn’t for the designer instinct to turn problems into opportunities for positive change, designers the world over would surely suffer from depression and perish as a result.

To be a designer is to be critical — to find fault for the purpose of improving a product, service, experience, environment or paradigm. The challenge for designers is to temper their critical (negative) nature with an imaginative, hopeful and creative (positive) nature. Temperament is not an easy skill to master, but one that can bring balance to the personal as well as professional life of a designer.

Dr. Barry Katz: Design and the Human Condition.

This is a really good talk if you have 40 minutes to spare. Starting with a rapid history of the evolution of design, Dr. Katz touches on the emergence of the Industrial Design (ID) discipline, the role of design in Silicon Valley, design education, why design is important, and more.

Bio

Dr. Barry Katz - Barry Katz has been an editor at Design Book Review and a contributing editor for I.D. magazine and Metropolis. His writings on the history and philosophy of design have appeared in many academic, professional, and popular journals. Barry’s books include Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation (Schocken Books, 1982), Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1989), and Technology and Culture: A Historical Romance (Stanford, 1990). His new book in progress, The Shape of Things to Come, studies the history of Silicon Valley design. He is a consulting professor in the design division at Stanford University and a fellow at IDEO Inc., a leading Silicon Valley design and innovation consultancy.