• Angelina Russo, Mei Mah, Tim Marshal, Caroline Payson
• ConnectEd Conference

21 August 2007Social media such as blogs, wikis and digital stories
facilitate knowledge exchange through social networking. Such media create a new forum within which dispersed audiences can engage with design processes to create new knowledge and artefacts. Across the online environment, there is a growing engagement with user-generated content which impacts on designers as they move from sole author and producer to facilitator of design processes. From the commercial successes of Flickr and YouTube to the design-centric initiatives such as ReadyMade and Design it Yourself , design education is just as impacted upon by the user-generated demand driven revolution as is
broadcasting and other forms of media. Ready Made, Instructions for Everyday Life, a design magazine and associated website, focuses on facilitating the production of design by providing readers with examples, instructions and
reviews on how "amateurs" can create their own design objects. Lupton?s ?DIY Design it Yourself? book and website proposes that those who have access to design tools can
?make tangible their own knowledge and concepts?(Lupton 2006: 15).

These two examples go some way to exploring the issues
which social media present to design education, including:
the role of community in the creative process; the
relationship between designer and outcome; the role of
designer in user-generated production and distribution; and
the long term effects of social media on design education and
practice. Design education may broaden to affirm the
interface between social sciences and design ensuring that
the designer brings a deeper understanding of social systems,
communities, audiences and motivations.

This paper uses a recent example of design education and social media networking from the Cooper Hewitt
National Design Museum to explore how design thinking
and design education can be made more transparent to
broader audiences whose engagement with design is
precipitated by a desire to engage in the process of
conceptualisation and production from their own
perspective.

This paper was given at the 2007 ConnectEd Conference.