Designers Don’t Discriminate

*Image Prerna Dudani

People today tend to group designers into specific fields of design such as fashion, graphic, interior etc. I had a colleague the other day claim that he could identify what design emphasis each student in our design class had just by looking at what they wear or how they arrange their notes. He claimed that the people who usually dressed chic and had messy notes were going into fashion designing while the people who were very put together and arranged their notes very well were going into interior design. But is this really true? Are fashion designers categorized only by clothes and interior designers only by order? NO and again NO!!

According to Professor Housefield, the Introduction to Design professor at UC Davis, each designer is like a Lego piece in the LegoLand world that is the design. We (designers) can be attached, detached and re-assembled to fit the needs of a certain project. We are not costume designers or web designers, we are just designers. We are Lego’s that have become part of a world that is bigger than one title or category: the design world.

The design world is not only constantly changing and evolving, but it is also getting increasingly connected. The design world of the 21^st century is broader and encompasses all sectors of society from business to science to the arts. In this 21^st century where globalization and the internet has made the world a smaller place, we as designers cannot pigeon-hole ourselves, to use Professor Housefield’s words. We can’t pretend that we don’t know much about fashion or graphics because as members (Legos) of the design world it is our job to know, and as members of society it is duty to know. As we have found out with the mortgage meltdown, each sector of society is connected to one another. So what happens in one part of the society affects all parts of that society. What’s happening in the fashion world can affect what happens in the graphic or interior world, or what’s happening in the justice world can affect the architectural designers’ world. So cannot label ourselves or discriminate between the different area of design because in the end we are all connected; we not only one plastic Lego piece in LegoLand but a Mickey Mouse in Disney World!

(The analogy here is that Lego Land represents the Design world and we are just a small piece of it, and Disney World represents the entire world and we are just a Mickey Mouse, a symbol that is abundant in Disney World and that has many forms eg. logos, rides, hats etc.).