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WHY THE FUTURE BELONGS TO DESIGNERS
Daniel Pink
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE: http://www.howdesign.com/db/features...yourheart1.asp

In a rousing keynote at the 2004 HOW Design Conference, speaker and author Daniel Pink declared that designers will play a huge role in the emerging economy. All you passionate creatives, unorthodox thinkers and unbridled innovators are poised for world domination. Who knew?

Because the working world that you and I live in is very different from the one that our parents prepared us for. In the 1970s?parents told their kids to become doctors, lawyers, accountants or engineers. Those jobs were the pathway to a happy and prosperous life. But that's not true anymore. The economy that's emerging today confers the greatest rewards on a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. It rewards not left-brain knowledge workers, but right-brain creators and empathizers. The future belongs to those kinds of folks?artists, designers.

Computers are now doing to routine knowledge work what robots and other fancy machinery have already done to routine factory work. They do the work faster, cheaper and often better. If a $200-a-month Indian chartered accountant doesn't swipe your comfortable accounting job, TurboTax will. Again, computers and software won't eliminate every left-brain job. But they will destroy many and reshape the rest.

Now, add up these three forces and the consequences are stark. The jobs that remain in the U.S. and elsewhere won't be "high-tech." Instead, they'll be "high-concept" and "high-touch."

High-concept means the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft satisfying narratives, to detect patterns and opportunities, to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High-touch means the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in the pursuit of purpose and meaning. Those are the things that computers can't do faster and foreigners can't do cheaper?and they result in the kinds of products, services and experiences that are in greater demand in an age of abundance.

Well, one, of course, is Design. The others are Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. Mastery of them?I call them the "six senses"?will increasingly mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. Fortunately, design is one profession that relies on all six of these abilities.

Designers are great at all six of these senses. Design? Of course. Check. Story? Yep, designers are pretty good at that. Symphony?putting it all together, seeing the big picture, combining disparate things into something novel? Three for three. Empathy? That's also a crucial part of being a designer?putting yourself in the shoes of the person who's going to read your brochure or see your poster. Same with Play. Designers certainly bring a much greater sense of fun to their jobs than, say, lawyers or accountants. And finally, there's Meaning. That's something else that designers accomplish?or at least try to accomplish?in their work. Indeed, that's one reason you get out of bed in the morning?to do something great, to make a difference, to create an image or a typeface or a look the world didn't know it was missing.

So you're six for six. Not bad. In fact, in many ways, design is the quintessential high-concept, high-touch field. Tell your mother that the next time she calls you wondering when you're going to get a real career.

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