Re: Take Back “Intelligent Design”

I was listening to an episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman yesterday and the guest, Rick Valicenti, mentioned a project that he did called “Intelligent Design: Creating an Evolved Red Vs. Blue State of Mind” which involved the red and blue states with the Coka vs. Pepsi war with binary codes and presentation. I guess that term could be used for situations like this, where both subjects are in the project.

While searching for that project, I also found a related usage of “intelligent design,” where Adobe did some sort of story of Rick Valicenti and his company Thirst. I guess here the term is used to represent computerized visualization and presentation of data.

Flush.

Take Back “Intelligent Design”

I think we should take back the term “intelligent design,” even though we didn’t really use it, unless you’re occasionally describing a piece of really good and clever and functional design. Nonetheless, I think this really confuses young designers and non-designers looking up things related to design.

I’m not necessarily pushing for this from a religious platform, but from more of a language/verbal stand point. I know that this term has already been used enough to describe creationism and related subjects, but I think that there’s still time to take this word back (or just take it for the first time) and use it to our advantage. If we use it right, we just might skip over the middle transition point where people get confused as to what “intelligent design” means and why it means what it means, and just claim it as ours (designers) as something that we always strive to reach in our work.

P.S. This suggestion of taking the term back was not originally from me; it was from a guest speaker (whom I’ve mentioned in this blog) when I was still at Davis.

Flush.