Just stumbled across this video from frog design*, which collides all sorts of classic, squeamish conversations and stereotypes from my chosen industry.
Moresco claims we don’t have the right words to express emergent concepts in design, so proposes some new ones, like “super normal” and “poptimsim”.
Some days, I feel his pain. I can’t even explain to people down the pub what I do, much less to my ninety-four year-old grandfather. But I think that’s probably more our fault within the design community than limitations of the English language.
A bridge to nowhere?
I ascribe much of this tension to the way design balances between the disciplines of marketing and engineering. Concerned both with how you make things and how you sell them, we need to translate concepts and information across these worlds, yet at the same time, stake out differentiated and own-able territory of our own. If you spend your life as a bridge, you wind up getting walked on a lot!
This is driving much of the current passion to position “design thinking” as a strategic business tool (see articles like this by Nussbaum in Business Week for an overview, if you haven’t been following the conversation.)
The third way
For all the hackles that rise when I hear “poptimism”, I am ready to embrace another of the words suggested in the video: “simplexity.”
Now with its own Wikipedia page, I do believe that breaking the binary opposition between the overly complicated and the blindingly obvious is pretty much the best description of what I actually do that I can come up with so far.
Of course, doesn’t get me out of those awkward pauses at the pub. Damn, back to drawing board.
*Disclaimer: my job has also required videos that make me cringe. I’m not trying to unduly slag the competition!
