Death. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. It may seem kind of ghoulish, but these days the design community is infatuated with death – what I call necrophilia. So many things in our midst are talked about as dead or dying. History is dead. Print is dead. Type is dead. The book is dead. The CD is dead. Matte black is dead. The stuff designers have made for generations is killing off the world’s vital resources – DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. It seems as though designers are happy to celebrate death, believing that all this talk of morbitity will lead to the rebirth of design.

Before the digital 90s, the designer’s principle tool (and socio-economic bugaboo) was forced obsolescence – making stuff that went out of style on a regular basis was an excuse to generate new stuff and new style to replace them, which increased consumption and grew the economy. Nobody spoke those guilt-triggering words: carbon footprint. But now designers are abuzz about reducing production and consumption, saving the planet’s resources, and this gives rise to the rumour that the design profession is dying.

Yet it is ironic, since designers are actually living longer than ever before – I know many who are happily and healthily working into their eighties and nineties. Some even know how to use the computer – the wonders of modern medicine.

I am not as old as them, but I am fatigued about contemplating what’s coming next – let’s call it future fatigue. What is in store for designers? Must we change our titles? Must we get new business cards? I get lots of those nervous “what’s the future of design?” questions from anxious college students (often when they can’t think of anything else to ask). Yet as superficial as those queries can be, I feel it is my responsibility to answer them without sounding too facetious. At a recent question/answer session following a talk I gave in New York titled “Nostalgia for the Future,” about how the old guys stole our best ideas when they envisioned the designs for the next millenia (the one we’re living in now), someone asked: Is nostalgia an excuse – a kind of talisman against death?

Hmm.

Talisman against death sounded better than “what is the future of design?” Yet what the questioner really wanted to know is whether I was afraid that design as I knew it was irrevocably changing. Was my retrospective-themed talk a way of coping with that insecurity, while failing to move forward in my own work?

Well, my work at this time is writing about design history (the safe past), but I also must stay current and futuristic since I lecture to MFA design students. I’m invested in the past but am concerned about the future. It is my duty to know where we’re headed as designers. At the very least I have to know if design is dead or not.

Fourteen years ago when I co-founded the MFA Designer and Author and Entrepreneur programme with Lita Talarico at the School of Visual Arts in New York, we decided to embrace traditional media while pushing the boundaries of what was then called “new media.” I was very worried that we couldn’t call it “new” for too much longer, so thank heavens people started calling it by other terms with digital somewhere in the prefix or suffix. It was around that time that one of my most forward thinking associates said: “Forget about communication or graphic design, or whatever you call it. Everything – and I mean everything – is transitioning to hand-held devices and with that the definition of graphic design will fundamentally change.” He cautioned that if we didn’t start teaching this future-stuff now, we’d become dinosaurs.

I’ve come to despise dinosaur metaphors as much as I hate Barney the Dinosaur.

Because progress is accelerating so quickly, becoming a dinosaur has never been as easy as it is today. So to preempt possible extinction, the necrophilia-philes have made blanket predictions about the death of this and that. I try not to be so reactionary, but it is hard not to question the definition(s) of design as we know it when technological changes in the field are so profound – and quick. Which isn’t to say design is dying, but it is evolving and the pleasures I had when I designed magazines years ago, has gone the way of that fabled prehistoric beast. My forward thinking associate, who was always a few steps ahead of the curve, was right about the handheld thing (apps, tablets, etc.), but curiously he’s actually now a few steps behind the curve, having locked himself into some ventures that are less scalable than he might have predicted.

And that got me thinking about why the specter of design’s demise is so popular: Maybe it is because too many designers are getting caught in an attempt to predict-the-future trap, and are forgetting why they became designers. I am not going to romantically rhapsodise about the scent of ink on paper kissed by mountain dew. But I re-call with longing that exalted state of having made something – with my own glue-encrusted hand – that was aesthetically beautiful and conceptually smart, filling  the heart with desire. Ok, I rhapsodised.

During the twentieth century, the title commercial artist changed into “graphic designer” (thanks to WA Dwiggins) and then designers (or some of them) were elevated from the unofficial designation of white knight of industry: Industrial designer, those who understood and designed consumables in accordance with 1930s machine age technologies changed the definitions of design and designing for decades to follow. But to my knowledge, none of these pioneers or formgivers uttered a word about the death of design. Evolution – even revolution – did not a priori mean “the end.” It meant different – sometimes for the good.

Design is in one of those flux periods. Rather than the death of one group, it is the birth of another group. Web and hand held designers have different tools to work with – and some have vastly different vocabularies (I hate term “stakeholder!”), but to be a designer is not fundamentally different.

The media have progressed. Time, space, motion and sound are endemic to the graphic designer tool kit. How to compose, pace and navigate in this virtual world, using some of the venerable forms is a challenge, but not all that different than in earlier – prehistoric – times. Designers are taking on more responsibilities, and so doing the definition of design – or at least the requisites of what a designer should know – have morphed. They must use their imagination to conceive  things that have either not existed before or are better than what has come before, whether it’s a typeface, package, product or whatever.

Design is not dead yet. But the suggestion that design is dying should be knocked off and buried – and soon.