2 Comments

FastCo article on state of the corporate market for "design leadership". Gives context for the 'role of designer' conversation. Lots of quotes and likely some of the names will be familiar. Some harkening back to the gold rush early Razorifish days.

"The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future: Did business really break up with design, or did it just break up with a generation of design leadership? "Robert Fabricant, FAST COMPANY, 2-15-2024

https://www.fastcompany.com/91027996/the-big-design-freak-out-a-generation-of-design-leaders-grapple-with-their-future

Expand full comment

Some Thoughts Upon Reading the Latest of Your Weekly Provocations:

I was a member of the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn for many years. As my monthly work assignment I did a project that was, practically speaking, a business process reengineering gig, and then later, I sat on the Personnel Committee, which was functionally the Human Resources function for the business. The handful septuagenarian employees that ran the coop - and I write this in awe and as a compliment - were perhaps the most ruthlessly efficient, effective, and creative capitalists I have run across my decades of wide-ranging professional adventures. I am a big fan of hacking our prevailing economic system to form and connect bubbles of civility, sustainability, justice, and inclusion... I attended art school with Andrew, I worked in a rival digital strategy startup during the internet gold rush of the late 1990's [Andy, OVEN vs. Me, Razorfish], and I have spent the last couple of decades as an unintentional social entrepreneur. Oooh so unintentional...

I DUNNO

I do not have a point, a lesson, or a Moral of the Story here. Intentionally so. I recently left a co-founder/co-leader position at a pro-reparations LLC, and I am enjoying a rare moment of pure intentional not-knowingness: What's the best way to navigate and participate in the end game of global consumer capitalism? What are points of highest leverage and my best role in relation to each? What role do the lenses/practices/communities of practice related to mutual aid/social movement/Just Transition have to play? How fruitful is the emerging interest in individual and collective grieving? Fascism/Authoritarianism/White Supremacy/Nativism, WTF? /For all this and more, I am indulging in the luxury of officially and explicitly as a matter of policy, Not Knowing. I am curious. I am fired-up. I am deeply committed to love and justice.

And for now, right now, I Don't Know.

Expand full comment