This is a new role that I am currently exploring for myself. The idea emerged from a recent era analysis I was doing as part of curating work examples from more than 30 years of professional practice.
This is a screen cap from my portfolio of the timeline I finally came up with as a means to summarize my work experience and industrial design influences. The unique work groups and teams at The Second City (accounts producer, 1998 to 2000) and Core77 (collaborator, clogger, content strategist 02.2006-10.2006) were as influential as any graduate design program or research university.
At Ymmärrys ry, our purpose for registering our non-profit association of creative practitioners from the visual arts and design fields is to contribute to the acceleration of societal transformation towards an environmentally neutral yet industrialized society that reflects the values and wellbeing needs of the disadvantaged. Therefore, our projects are designed to meet the higher order goals of interactions, systems, environments (see Buchanan’s four orders of design), as well as provide the artefacts of first and second orders of design such as symbology, graphics, and products.
Design can thus be said to be an accelerant – one step removed from the direct object of its practice. In human centered or user centered design this direct object is traditionally the human user at the center. When designing for acceleration, what robustly scales is skills development that fosters agency and capacity for creative expression as a means to experiment and make changes to existing practices as a means to enhance one’s own resilience to shocks and sustain revenues in fallow times.
