The Bane Of Design

The rapid advancement of technology should help design in theory. More options become available, limitations fade away, design can be free to operate without constraints. In theory, the technology we have today should have made a whole slew of truly creative intellectual property. Yet, it seems this is not so.

The whole hypersaturated market of virtually identical first person shooter games and movies like John Carter attest to this. Something has gone wrong, that the new affordances of technology aren't fostering increased creativity, but seem to have reduced it instead. My take is that technology has become a form of creativity in and of itself, where the eye candy and special effects have led to complacency. Where one was bound by massive constraints just 2 decades ago, forcing creative thinking around technological limitations, now one simply slaps a pretty new skin on a stinking old carcass and calls it a whole new creation. Goodness gracious me.

Designers and other creative people need to find their way out of this rut, to stimulate themselves to think outside the box that superior presentation technology has ironically locked them into. To fail to see this is to allow technology to become the bane of design.