Design as a Conversation

Design is a language of its own.  It has the power to send a message all across the planet, crossing over many language barriers.  Thanks to symbols and other images, people can understand each other in ways they never have before.  But also with design, people can communicate with each other in a brand new way, because design is also a conversation.

Look at advertisement as an example.  Here is a simple ad for an iPod.

http://www.designlessbetter.com/blogless/posts/
weekend-ponderable-self-fulfilling-prophecy

Notice there are actual words in this ad.  Yet there is no confusion as to what it is for.  This can be used universally, and everyone understands it.  Design has the power to do that.  In advertisement, design can be a conversation between the designers/ creators and the consumers (or quite honestly, us).  They use this conversation to tell the consumers which product they should buy, as well as why they should buy it.

Thanks to the invention of blogs and the modern day Internet, the design conversation has also been transformed.  Now when a design is released, conversation is almost immediately stimulated among people.  In a previous entry, I blogged about Pepsi changing their logo, and if you look for twenty seconds on the Internet, you will easily be able to find people’s responses to change in logo.  Do people like it better? Or do they think its worse?  People’s opinions and responses can now be found all over the Internet.

Because the conversation has become so prevalent on the Internet, designers now are able to answer the responses of the consumers.  Design truly becomes a back and forth conversation that allows consumers to give input into a designer’s creation, while the designers can reconstruct and redesign pieces to make them more relatable than ever before.