DESIGNERS ARE PARTNERSHIP BROKERS
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes about how the conditions are changing and we are designing our own profession. This might be a different condition to before. She discusses changes that have come with the digital world and then says:
“many old titles and jobs no longer make sense”
“A similar phenomenon is happening with traditional professions. Technologies that connect people to knowledge, services, and one another across the globe have acted as a centrifugal force, spinning functions and authority away from the center toward millions of previously silent and disempowered individuals. The result is that many old titles and jobs no longer make sense, and many new functions are just waiting to be claimed.”
She points out the changes that we are performing in the blog digital world:
“Today the function of finding information can be performed by crowd-sourcers; mappers of local sources; filters and curators of tweets, posts, and liveblogs; algorithm designers, data scientists, and knowledge managers.”
“PARTNERSHIP BROKERS”
She writes about PARTNERSHIP BROKERS: “governments, NGOs, foundations, and corporations are all investing in public-private partnerships and global collaborative networks”
She says that Partnership Brokers are those that “work as an intermediary building effective and innovative collaboration in non-traditional partnerships and cross-sectoral networks.”
To me this is pointing to those that use the open design methodological method of making things possible and active by connecting methods and philosophies between actors of various and often separate kinds. What has always stimulated me is the knowledge that the open minded designer is the one that knows nothing well but lots of things simultaneously. And knows how to employ and have dialogue with the experts in specialized fields so that things can be realized. It does not matter if it is business, philosophy or knowledge of traditional method but to know how to make things possible in collaboration to improve conditions and life. The methods are somehow collaborations and possibilities of co-employment of expertice. This condition is growing more every day with the opening of tools that support collaborations like the internet, inter communications etc. And what is also happening is that the young are bypassing very fast those that are still grounded in old rules and methods. One starts to meet youngs and actually very youngs that are friends on facebook or something similar and they co-operate globally. This I can confirm directly but do not spend time explaining except telling that one knows many parents of teenagers that do not understand why their kids are chatting globally about their interests on the internet.
“DESIGN DEVELOPERS”
To operate in design development is extremely interesting these days cause of the shifts that one is experincing through students and actually non students but just actors. My feeling is that this condition is not finished or over but just the start of a completely different world that might be possible if we manage to address our current environmental disasters. And I trust more the young generation for that than the global companies.
In the design schools we have to address these new conditions and prepare our students for a completely different professional and real world than we the old teachers were prepared for. We have ways to address this. In our school in Oslo we run projects to prepare the designers of the future for a different world that we have no idea how will develop. Here is a sample of operating in the DEEFT project. I keep quoting Paola Antonelli about the role of Design in the coming decades for world development. See here.
DEEFT
January 4, 2013
Posted in: ARCHITECTURE, ART, DESIGN, PONDERINGS, SUSTAINABILITY
