This is a sort of follow up to something I posted last year how the future of design will be in designers giving up our fussy and precious obsession with control. It seems I’m no longer alone:

Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation… We need to learn to begin to let go.

AG Lafley, CEO P&G

I first experienced the limits of design’s control in my graduate thesis project. My project was based around intelligent agents that define a service over time through interaction with its user. In this project user testing always resulted in positives–false positives I soon learned. Why? Because there was nothing to test but imaginary scenarios I invented. Users were reacting to my ability to address their needs and not the product’s. But I would not be the product. There was in fact no way using established methods to test such services because they could not exist prior to use.

(Extreme digression: Of course the faculty couldn’t see the limits I was bumping into. “Are you suggesting that you don’t need to test your designs? That your product is so good it doesn’t need testing?” they sneered (ironic coming from a faculty that have never user tested their product–the curriculum they designed and industry’s experience with students infused with it. No I wasn’t suggesting that at all. I was experiencing the limits of their unquestioned dogma–something they were too blind to see and I was too green to truly appreciate)

As the things we design become more interactive, more self-determining, more deeply integrated with thier users, the less control designers will exercise over the final artifact. This is not only inevitable, its good. And it demands that we work and think in ways earlier generations of designers did not and could not.

Fussy and precious signature design is finished. Sure decoration stylists like Karim Rashid and Phillipe Starck will likely still garner some fame, but they are stylists and not designers. Tomorrow’s designers will be more authors than typographers, more concerned with the story and its telling than with the shape of letters it may be written in.

While Lafley comments specifically on branding and branding’s need to let go of its precious OCD fetishes, his words are equally true for design generally.