The Decade in Design

What makes a seasoned Visual Ambassador know what a person in the business for 5 years might not?

You get a better sense of the cycle of things. There’s a feel for
what’s a fad and what will really endure.

What’s my secret? Experience
and not predicting the future.  If you’re right, everybody hates you,
and if you’re wrong, well… they remember that.

The “ought” decade brought major changes to creativity do to new
technology!  Let’s look how design has influenced our lives. Why
business culture is moving to really intrigues and engages people. Why
if you want long term growth, you don’t start with technology but with
design. That’s one of those enduring truths.

This is a great article from GOOD on the decade in design.  Enjoy…

Ten years of Apple, starchitects, and design for change.

Being a designer means being able to not only predict
the future, but to have a hand in shaping it as well. In the last 10
years, however, designers also had to dramatically change the way they
worked: What other industry got to weather the dot-com crash, a real
estate bubble, and the death of print?

But it was not all boom and bust. The design field redesigned itself
during this decade, transforming from an industry that created better
objects to one that created better experiences—and endeavored to
deliver them to everyone, not just the people who could afford them.
Design was the place for big thinkers to cultivate new technology, and
it’s where the sustainability movement found its most trusted partners.
Here’s a look back on the design decade that was.

2000

No Logo, Naomi Klein’s treatise on anti-globalization, sets the tone for the decade’s debates about consumerism and branding.

Tech stocks plummet,
signaling the official burst of the dot-com bubble. Thousands of
newly-minted web designers are laid off. San Francisco’s cafes swell
with unemployed creatives paying inflated rents.

Dwell publishes its first issue, transforming the way that people understand—and purchase—modern design.

The Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum launches the annual National Design Awards, giving nods to Frank Gehry and Apple.

American Apparel moves into
its current factory in downtown Los Angeles. Under the leadership of
Dov Charney, it becomes an incongruous champion of locally-produced
fair-labor clothing, racy quasi-pornographic advertising, and Helvetica.

After a tight presidential
election introduces the world to the Floridian hanging chad, AIGA’s
Design for Democracy begins a massive effort to redesign and
standardize voting across the nation.

2001

Apple’s first retail store
opens. Steve Jobs announces the first-generation iPod, which can hold
512 MB of music. It is available only in white.

The Mini Cooper is launched
in the United States, followed by the Toyota Prius, the first
mass-produced hybrid vehicle. The SUV backlash begins.

September 11, 2001: The
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center utterly transform the
skyline of New York City and destroy two of the world’s greatest
architectural and engineering feats: Minoru Yamasaki’s 1973 twin towers.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring reforms live-action purists by showing the artistry possible with digital filmmaking. Nerds rejoice.

The Prada Epicenter Store in
New York’s SoHo makes retail into a spectacle, thanks to a
collaboration with Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, 2×4, and IDEO. Flocks of tourists
try on Prada clothing just to play with the legendary dressing room
doors, which become frosted for privacy with an electric current.

2002

Design Within Reach opens
its first retail store, reintroducing midcentury designers like George
Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames back into the vernacular.

The stop-motion Lego animation of the White Stripes’ video Fell in Love with a Girl by
Michel Gondry heralds a new generation of video and commercial auteurs
who bring their specific aesthetic to feature films (and Criteron
Collection DVD sets).

Minority Report’s
Precrime interface, designed by Imaginary Forces and Schematic, spurs
interactive firms worldwide to create similar real-life multi-touch and
gesture-recognition systems.

William McDonough publishes the sustainability manual Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. An industry-wide call to make “cradle-to-cradle” products supersedes the more ambiguous movement of “going green.”

2003

Jeffrey Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards transforms the way that web developers interact with code, calling for universal accessibility across browsers.

“Design thinking” is referenced in a BusinessWeek article.

DIY doyenne Martha Stewart is indicted for insider trading. She goes to jail, where she teaches craft classes to fellow inmates.

The Droog Design Foundation
opens its first retail store in Amsterdam, becoming the magnetic center
for an era of witty, issue-oriented industrial design. A signature
piece is a chair made from piles of bound-together rags.

2004

The first batch of city
funding is allocated for what will become the High Line, a community
effort to transform an abandoned railway into a New York City park, and
the most talked-about public space project in years.

The Beautiful Losers
exhibition opens at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati,
legitimizing the work of street artists and skateboarders who have been
influencing culture for decades.

H&M launches its first collaboration with a high-end designer, Karl Lagerfeld.

Massive Change by Bruce Mau is released, asking designers to think about their work within a greater global context.

Zaha Hadid, architect of swoopy, sculptural, computer-generated forms, is the first woman awarded the Pritzker Prize.

The Dove Campaign for Real
Beauty is launched by Ogilvy & Mather, featuring self-esteem
messaging for young girls, an attack on glossy magazines, and imagery
of real women shot by Rankin.

2005

The One Laptop Per Child project announced by Nicholas Negroponte. The lime-green laptop is later designed by Yves Béhar.

Target debuts the Clear Rx
pharmacy bottle, a redesigned system for safely labeling medication.
The idea originated as a School of Visual Arts design thesis project by
Deborah Adler.

Emigre, the seminal graphic design journal published by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, publishes its final issue.

Etsy.com launches as a new way for a swelling community of designers, makers, and crafters to sell their goods online.

Industrial designer Hella Jongerius mass-produces the Jonsberg vases for Swedish retailer IKEA.

Philip Johnson, a modernist architect famous for black angular boxes and black rounded glasses, dies.

The housing bubble peaks.
Prices skyrocket and the building frenzy reaches critical mass. Cranes
crowd the skyline in every major metropolitan area.

2006

Architecture for Humanity’s
TED Prize winnings are put towards the launch of the Open Architecture
Network, allowing architects to easily share best practices for
building affordable, sustainable structures in communities around the
world.

The Council for Fashion
Designers of America introduces legislation to copyright their designs,
lead by new president Diane von Furstenberg.

We Feel Fine, created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, heralds a new era for data visualization and internet-based art.

Widely considered to be the
first green skyscraper, the Hearst Tower opens as a Gold LEED-certified
building that tops a 1928 structure with a glittering, pixelated
bouffant by Norman Foster.

An Inconvenient Truth changes the way we think about global warming, Power Point-style presentations, and Al Gore.

The Wii gaming console is
launched by Nintendo, forever transforming the way we interact with
games. We never need to go outside again.

2007

The type-focused documentary Helvetica,
directed by Gary Hustwit, premieres at South by Southwest, the same
time and place as another type-focused product debuts: Twitter.

Design for the Other 90%
opens at the Cooper-Hewitt, showcasing hundreds of products and
initiatives that designers are creating for the rest of the world’s
population.

The 2012 London Olympic logo
by Wolff Olins is revealed, sparking a international scandal as more
than 50,000 British citizens sign a petition against its design. An
animated version is said to cause seizures.

Mad Men debuts on
AMC to a small audience, but Matthew Weiner’s tireless meticulousness
in recreating 1960’s ad campaigns, three-martini lunches, and pregnant
smokers quickly makes it a cultural touchpoint for all creatives.

The I-35 bridge collapses in
Minneapolis, killing 179 and forcing inspections of the United States’
deteriorating infrastructure.

Amazon’s e-book reader, the Kindle, debuts. Book designers call it a print-killer. Industrial designers call it ugly.

“One more thing…” At Apple’s keynote event, Jobs introduces the iPhone.

2008

Industrial designer Philippe Starck declares “design is dead,” retires, signs on to star in BBC reality show Design for Life.

Shepard Fairey creates the
“Hope” poster to support Barack Obama’s presidential run. It becomes
the single most representative image of any political campaign, ever.
Fairey spends the next year in a heated fair-use battle with the
Associated Press. No one wins. Oh, except Obama.

The Designers Accord, dubbed the “Kyoto Treaty of design,” sees 120,000 firms and individuals sign on as adopters.

Brad Pitt hires a bevy of
starchitects including Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, and Shigeru Ban to
design flood-proof houses for Hurricane Katrina victims and raises
millions of dollars through his foundation, Make it Right.

Design and the Elastic Mind,
curated by the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator and design
cheerleader Paola Antonelli, illustrates the many applications of
design beyond creating physical objects.

2009

Dubai’s Burj Dubai, designed
by Adrian Smith, tops out at 2,684 ft, the tallest man-made structure
ever built. It’s scheduled to open in January 2010 as reports of
Dubai’s downfall begin to trickle into architectural publications.

Ninety-eight-year-old architectural photographer Julius Shulman dies. A documentary of his life, Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman directed by Eric Bricker and narrated by Dustin Hoffman, enters wide release.

The Aspen Design Summit,
previously the 58-year-old International Design Conference at Aspen,
relaunches under the guidance of the Winterhouse Institute, AIGA, and
Change Observer, a new social change-focused division of the blog
Design Observer.

William Kamkwamba, a Malawi inventor who built a wind farm for his village from scrap metal when he was 14, publishes his book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

CityCenter, the United
States’ largest privately-funded development in history and one of the
largest starchitect collaborations in the world, opens in Las Vegas
with aspirations of “green superdevelopment” cred.

A meeting with Washington
officials and a multi-disciplinary group of designers forming the
United States Design Policy advocacy group solidifies a plan for
designers and policymakers to begin working more closely together in
2010.

http://www.good.is/post/the-decade-in-design