AGideas: Is Design Difference?

This week I attended the AGideas conference in Melbourne. For those who don't know, AGideas is a three day conference that attempts to bring various luminaries from the world of design (and beyond) to talk to Australian designers. It's a really great conference to be able to attend, especially if you are at all curious about the process that goes in to creating a piece of design. The speaker list for this year was impressive: Stefan Sagmeister and Tobias Frere-Jones were definite highlights, along with a broad range of others (including writer John Marsden). What I wanted to talk about today was not so much the individual speakers, but the theme for the event. We are told that "Design is Difference" — a fine statement that, given the current economic climate, makes a certain amount of business sense. The tagline is structured in such a way that it doesn't define anything (even though it tries to say that design = difference) — both of the key terms are so broad that the phrase could come to mean anything. When you're putting a conference together and trying to help speakers out with their presentations, I'm sure it is helpful to have a broad topic. But when you are one of the premier design event on the Australian calendar, your tag line should mean something. Let's start by defining some terms. To quote Sagmeister; 'I hate to answer "what is design?" It's a stupid question.' — but I think it needs doing anyway. For now, design will be defined as something created or done with intent. Difference can be said to be a change in state. We're still no closer to cracking this little nut, though. Design may well be different, but different from what? A state of un-design? That seems too simplistic. It cannot be that design is different from any other human pursuit — most others are designed, to some degree. I would argue that design is, in fact, sameness. Design brings order and form to an otherwise chaotic environment. It is this ordered beauty that makes design so great. To call general design difference is to deny what it does. Maybe they are referring to 'good' design? In a world where truly shitty design is the norm, the three days of AGideas were a truly different experience. While there was no real 'Richard Seymour' moment (something I am now sure was a once in a lifetime thing) the quality of design and, perhaps more importantly, thought on display was truly inspiring and intimidating. It wasn't so much that design was difference, it was more that it was different design.