MPR Says You Call the Shots In Fixing Bad Design
An interesting story that dropped in our collective laps from Minnesota Public Radio. It’s a story called “Who Has the Power to Influence Design?” and it can be read or listened to, depending on how your mood is at the moment. The long and short of it is about the common man now requiring more education about design, its importance, and how, if something suffers from a lack of clear and useable design, individuals can, and need to be, making a difference by choosing to say no. So, in effect, the piece is about the potentially rising importance of design to your Average Joe, which seems like a really good thing. Here’s a bit from the intro leading into what’s happening/could happen:
Tom Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, says we live in a society where we aren’t educated about design and we aren’t involved in the design process. So when we come across a design problem, whether it’s in a product or a building or a neighborhood, we feel powerless.
“Most of us never have any exposure to design in K-12 education. We might have a little exposure in art class, maybe,” says Fisher. “Most of us, if we go to college, never take a design course or even a design appreciation course. And yet this is something which probably not only affects us every day, but every minute of every day.”
