The Revolution Will Be Convenient
(Selling Design)
The revolution will be convenient.
That phrase reads to me as cynical, but it’s a bit difficult to nail down why. Is convenience diametrically opposed to the correct application of idealism, or is that merely a convention of the classical stories I grew up with? Where did I learn that idea? What would it mean to unlearn it? What would it mean to communicate the proposition without the accompanying judgement?
That the world is changing fast is something of a cliche. Everyone has an explanation for why this is, some of those explanations are even suitable for public consumption. The approved versions tend to be optimistic or apocalyptic. We are, by design, by our very natures, transforming our environments into utopian physical/social spaces one tweet at a time, or we are irrevocably wrecking our environments, social and otherwise, via our unrestrained impulse to exploit them. These propositions can both be true. They can both be false. What is undeniable, is that they are both attention-seeking.
Problem spaces and their accompanying hypothesized solutions need to fill two functions for a designer. We need to supply the possibility of improvement via a targeted analysis of a problem, and we need to generate sufficient interest in the problem-space to implement our solution. We are simultaneously the good cop and the bad cop by necessity. We must A.B.C. (always be closing). This Catastrophizing/Pollyanna approach is somewhat hampered by the fact that occasionally the best solutions are minor tweaks of existing architecture, digital or physical. That iterative solutions are common place and effective.
English, for example, will likely remain the language of commerce due to the sheer convenience of the City of London’s timezone. The expansion of increasingly effective ESL teaching, however, will continue to accelerate trade between local resource-poor markets that will rarely, if ever, interact with American or British markets.
Perhaps convenient was the wrong word.
The Revolution Will Be Invisible.
Doesn’t that sound more interesting?
