Do designers create culture? I am not sure that is as big of an issue as Katherine McCoy makes it out to be. I do agree that there is a problem with the way things are often pushed on the consumer but I am not sure that this is necessarily a design issue.
McCoy asked the question “how do we create culturally meaningful experiences from scratch and on demand?” I am not sure that we can. The way I understand culture is that it is the beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior of a particular group of people that come from a particular place, class, or time to which the people belong. It seems that it would generally be beneficial for designers to work with this and not against it, and I think it happens more often that we perhaps know.
Nearly everything we design is targeted to someone and before we even start to design the item, we first research the people we will be targeting. We try to understand the targeted audience to the best of our ability so that we can design for what is important to them. Even huge corporations and brands do this. An example of this is the current KFC campaign, they pose the question of having a real family dinner on a weeknight they then say: “bring back dinner”. KFC is playing directly in to our set of cultural standards of wanting a home cooked dinner every night. This idea of a family dinner is part of our culture, and rather then fighting it, (as KFC is not a home cooked meal) KFC is playing right into it. Generally speaking brands are using our culture to their advantage. If they did not they would not be as successful. I do thing that design changes culture (and maybe more in the underdeveloped countries) but without culture it would be much harder to do meaningful design.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
designers absolutely do create culture, one project at a time. that kfc family dinner ad, when we see it, becomes a little piece of our human experience, just like the books and magazines we read, the flyers we see on campus, and the music we listen to. to define our contribution more specifically, we should perhaps say we create visual culture.
rose, your definition mentions social behavior as an attribute of culture. consider the effect the web and all of our communications technologies have had on our social behavior. designers (industrial and graphic) made that stuff.
it makes total sense that corporations would play directly to our cultural practices. the more they can insert their products/services/"promises" into our mental notion of a specific aspect of culture -- like family dinners -- the more they stand to profit.
i believe design can and should be used to affirm and enhance our human experience. it is up to each of us to decide if kfc associating itself with family dinner is enhancing our human experience. the way designers talk about brands sometimes frightens me because it begins to take on spiritual aspirations, actually attempting to become the "beliefs, customs, practices, and social behavior" that you mention in your defintion. it's one thing for design to assist and enhance our experience of those things, but quite another for the artifact (or aura surrounding the artifact -- "the brand") to *become* the belief, custom, practice or behavior. do you see the difference? within a christian framework, that is called idolatry.
so maybe i refine and limit my initial assertion that designers create culture. maybe i won't. perhaps some designers have succeeded in creating true culture. do people honestly believe in nike, have starbucks customs, amazon practices, and myspace social behavior?
Post a Comment