A new institution led by the recognized interaction designer Jon Kolko (associate creative director at frog design) is calling the attention of the design community: the Austin center for design. On their own words, this organization exists “to transform society through design and design education.” We would like to subscribe to this idea!
It seems to be – and the recent talk by Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) on TED, urging designers to think big, went in that direction – that design is moving forward (maybe backwards: our profession has a lost tradition of this way of thinking) and avoiding the banal and futile use of the term, where design seems to be confined to act on the surface (the top part of Jesse James Garret’s diagram about the elements of user experience). Therefore, as this happens at the very last part of any given process, designers are usually called on board where most decisions are already taken. We have the task of making them nice, easy to use, beautiful…
I’d like to salute Kolko and the people behind this new institution and hope to see a myriad of enterprises like this one flourishing all over the world.
