If Designers Are the Enemy, Are Innovators the Heroes?

Woohoo! There’s nothing like a design bombshell to distract us from our Monday mourning. It all started when Bruce Nussbaum, champion of spelling and punctuation innovation, lashed out at designers in a speech he gave at Parsons last week:

In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

Well, actually, it didn’t start there. Nussbaum’s arrogant designer bashing actually goes all the way back to last week, when he picked up on something Philippe Starck supposedly said at TED:

“We are almost gods now,” said Starck.

It seems that quote was taken a bit out of context, especially since most TED bloggers claimed that Starck wasn’t as much arrogant as impossible to understand. Nussbaum apologized and leaves it up to the video to decide (it’s not posted yet). Nussbaum also references the wonderful Core77 article about design backlash that was published a few months ago, but doesn’t link to it. Maybe because it’s a lot better than his speech.

In the meantime, for the sucky designers out there who can’t read (probably all of you, you arrogant, delusional bastards with god complexes), David Armano has illustrated Nussbaum’s speech.

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