From Design to Designing

Over the past two years, AIGA has been reorienting its own mission. One critical revision to AIGA's course is that it is focusing on promoting the value of the designing process rather than solely individual designers and their artifacts. While we will continue to honor great and effective design, we will also engage with “Designing” as a way of thinking.

In today's world, complex problems are usually those defined by a complex context. And increasingly, as noted in the Kyoto protocols, the Johannesburg conference on sustainable development, the global tensions surrounding cultural terrorism or revulsion, and a stumbling of economic growth, the context involves economic, environmental and cultural dimensions.

The design profession has been building a momentum toward taking on the really difficult problems facing a troubled planet; AIGA has simply tapped into that extraordinary potential with “Voice: AIGA National Design Conference,” the “Postscript” issue of Trace, the journal Gain, the Design for Democracy, the new focus on the process of designing and “The Power of Design: AIGA National Design Conference,” held in Vancouver in 2003.