Today’s must-read is an essay by Valerie Casey, Creative Director of frog design in New York.
Casey says that product design is kaput. “An audience of product fetishists might find this assertion unthinkable, given all the pop-business literature declaring “design” as the new black,” she writes. But a trio of forces — pressure to get to market fast, the rise of design schools in China, and the ability of consumers to fashion their own products — are placing product designers “on a trajectory to irrelevance and ultimately, invisibility.”
While I don’t agree with much of what she says, she raises several arguments that must be reckoned with.