Wonderings: AIGA's Emerging Markets
Just went to my first AIGA seminar of the year, "Emerging Markets: Designing Youth with K-Hole" and came away with a few points I thought worth spreading.
Ceiling of lecture hall at Museum of Arts and Design
art + business
While business and the arts are often viewed as separate industries, the truth is that marketing decisions are often artistic decisions informed by intuition. Similarly, artistic decisions are often marketing decisions. This probably comes as no surprise to graphic designers, since our role boils down to communicating a message in a way that maximizes its effectiveness to the target audience. Helping those outside our industry see this could facilitate collaboration and result in higher impact solutions—we can lend our unique expertise and creative thinking to the conversation earlier, and it equips us with greater understanding to design more effectively at the same time.
Being Different vs Empathy
K-Hole's most recently released analysis argued that in trying to be special and different, we wind up doing things that alienate ourselves from each other. Instead of all the differences becoming mainstream, everything became a subculture. Even those driven to exhaustion in trying to be different and therefore refusing to differentiate were still essentially trying to be different from those who were trying to assert their specialness. The "out" is to find a sameness that everyone can relate to. K-Hole asserted that this boils down to seeking empathy. This leads me to the question: what can we do to create unifying experiences that bring back the opportunity to empathize with each other?
Data Agnosticism
K-Hole view themselves as data agnostic, saying "Data has become a weird way of proving oneself...Some people use data as a replacement for critical thinking." I love analysis and information, but I also love the freedom to try something new without already having market research prove it's "tried and true" aka safe.
What do you think of these assertions? Did you attend and find any other points of interest worth sharing?