Designer’s Poison by Frank Chimero
Earlier this week AIGA sponsored a round-table discussion with every designer on Twitter called One Day for Design. As expected, it was a cacophony of noise with the occasional delightful or insightful nugget. It was less discussion and more a match of wits battling in profundity (with a bit of jest directed at the whole thing too). The event wound up, to my eyes, not so much a dialogue, but more a sequence of soundbites trying to be strung together into a dialogue. I feel for the moderators who were given the impossible task of trying to make sense of the mess and herd cats. They are smart, capable people that were put in a weird spot with a tough job.
Part of this has to do with the format. It’s very difficult to have a “listening state” on Twitter, and great conversations seem to be built more on listening than speaking. On top of that, Twitter is a difficult mechanism to corral into a conversation because it doesn’t let you curate tweets into a linear sequence of events. Twitter handles back and forth between 2 and 3 people relatively well, but breaks once more people involved. Twitter seemed like the wrong place for the discussion, because it presented a conversation on design that required holistic thinking in a fragmented manner.
