September 2007 Archives
Cooper Union's Wollman Auditorium was the setting for Wednesday evening's Mediabistro panel entitled "The Future of Design." The five-member, all-female panel was convened in order to explore "what's driving change in the design industry today." The discussion was founded on the assumption that the old-school, craft-focused concept of the designer as individual creator or "author" is rapidly becoming obsolete. To replace it, a multidisciplinary, interactive approach to design is forming, one in which clients play almost as active a role as do creatives. The panelists hinted at the causes for this evolution (technological innovation and economic change being foremost among them), but they mainly spoke about how designers can apply the emerging paradigm.
