Designing our own graves? (By Dmitri Siegel)

Dmitri Siegel is the Vice President of Global Brand for SONOS. He is in charge of, all brand experience, brand activation, paid media and brand creative. Also he has published and lectured widely on the topics of design, technology and digital culture.


He discussed how the filed of design is changed by prosumer. A prosumer is the consumer who becomes involved with designing and customizing products for her/his own needs. He mentioned it by comparing Karim Rashid`s book "Design yourself" with Martha Stewar`s magazine "Design your life".  Siegel believed people dont just eat food any more, they present it or they dont buy t-shirts, they sell them by doing it themselves. He says everyone can participate in designing. The phrase of "design your life" is an extended economic & cultural cicumestances that he calls Prosumerism-Simultaneous production.

Another phrase that he mentioned is The Templated Mind which can be developing costumer mentality about the definition of the product. Siegel states that the templated mind relies on the outcome of social production more that designer's crafted messages so as a result of that the design of products are changed like movable types. It lets many people to publish themselves on webs and majority of the images of the website has been formed by the constrained formats automatically. Then costumers access to all products such as phone wallpapers or rating movies on Netflix.

In the past one of the most important element for selling the book was the book cover hover these days peer reviews and recommendations are more essential so the World of Mouth can plays an important role in marketing and they can be distributed all over the world fast.

The intersting part of this essay was about changing the role of graphic design in the music industry. After 1980 the cassettes were changed to compact discs then they were shifted to MP3 format. Finally the album covers have shrunk the album art canvas to a 200*200 pixel JPEG format. So graphic designers can just employed to make6*6 pixel favicon (favourite icon) as the album is Kind of organising principle may disappear soon.