*Okay, since this is Paola Antonelli of the NY Museum of Modern Art, this article is written in a shiny, semitranslucent curatorese. However, I think Paola's right, because she's describing something that is happening in many other disciplines as well as in design.
*People used to sit next to the factory because that was the basic means of production; even authors rushed to New York because that's where the presses were spitting ink. If you can offshore that, and phone in the plans... well, yeah, the smokestacks slowly fall over. Then creative people tend to cluster around big thick clouds of make-believe potential vaporware. It doesn't have to be "real" production – yet. It can be real some of the time and mostly just... context. Even factories go all just-in-time, they spit up bits and pieces of fab-stuff. Even the big trade shows go away. It's about the schools, sort of... but no, not really. Mostly it's about the cloud. The cloud doesn't exist yet, so it's the Internet's own native version of this dynamic; a conceptual Internet that might become a real service, if people get around to shipping something someday.
*Or, as Matt Jones recently put it (in another design context) physical industrially-designed products become "attention anchors" for a new virtual/actual "resilient thingfrastructure that is legible, discoverable and repeats up the stack." Then Matt showed some pics of imaginary gadgets that were designed to become "resilient thingfrastructure," and they looked new. They looked kind of weird and meager and yet dense and busy, like formerly dignified electronic components crammed into some makeshift digital favela. They looked cheap and ugly and yet scarily full of radical possibility. And then, yeah, I believed him. And I believe Paola, too.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/a_new_map_for_design/
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"Since the industrial revolution ushered in the modern idea of design, different poles have anchored design, attracted designers and intermediaries, and concentrated cultural and technological production. The manufacturing plants themselves, which vertically integrated all aspects of production and marketing from design to distribution, were the first. (...)
"This model persisted until after World War II, when the poles began to shift. Companies then began to subcontract most of the actual construction, while they continued to handle the pre- and post-production phases themselves. This is still the model used by either very big companies such as Herman Miller or Steelcase, or smaller companies producing objects in different materials, each of which requires dedicated plants and technologies.
"Even in that context, however, the geography of design shifted. Whereas subcontractors once tended to be located in specific areas such as Michigan, California, or north of Milan, today they are spread all over the world.
"Just as the landscape of manufacturing has changed, so has the conference scene. (((Uh-oh.))) Milan’s Solone has been joined on the map by a number of fairs and salons that make up smaller red dots, including London (in September), Tokyo and Kortrijk, Belgium (in October), Paris and Cologne (January), and Berlin and New York (May). Several opportunities now exist for people to meet and do business, and new forms of design that have, for instance, multimedia and interfaces as their focus, have entered the mix. Other gatherings not traditionally considered “design,” such as Ars Electronica in Linz or TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Monterey, have begun competing for designers’ attention and money. (((Given that we have a financial crisis where we suddenly realize that our money was imaginary, maybe we're also heading for an "attention crisis" when we suddenly realize that we can't pay any more attention to anything. Does this seem far-fetched to you? Me neither.)))
"Moreover, the tough financial situation and dwindling travel funds; the increasing number of resources and opportunities available online; the ease of movement from digital design to digital production that renders prototyping almost unnecessary until the moment of distribution; the shrinking of the luxury industry, where much of this type of design resides; (((Paola is so cultured and intelligent, it's really a luxuriant pleasure to read prose like this)))) the increased sensitivity to the footprint caused by air travel; and especially the massive shift of the design profession from making things to proposing models, visualizing complexity, and building scenarios, are all working together to further endanger this latest design world map.
"What is important now is the production of ideas: The poles have become lighter and more immaterial, having rid themselves of much of the baggage of material production. The geography of design has transformed; systems are now built around schools rather than industry...."
