Overview of Article: This is a summery/review of Tim Brown’s new book “Change By Design” from the NY Times.Redefining a Profession
LONDON — The bet was for $50,000. It was offered by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, to the designer Raymond Loewy, in 1940. The challenge was to spruce up the packaging of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Loewy accepted the wager, and Hill asked when he expected to finish. “Oh, I don’t know,” drawled the designer. “Some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package… I’ll call you then.”
Loewy won the bet, and claimed the credit for the subsequent increase in Lucky Strike’s sales. That was nearly 70 years ago, and design has changed dramatically since then, as the designer Tim Brown relates in his new book, “Change by Design.” “Few designers today would even touch this type of project,” he writes of Loewy’s assignment. “What excites the best (design) thinkers today is the challenge of applying their skills to problems that matter.”
He’s kind of right and kind of wrong. Much as I’d like to believe that designers are too altruistic to bother fiddling with the graphics on cigarette packets, many still do. But it is true that more and more designers are devoting their time to serious stuff, like repairing environmental damage or kindling economic recovery, and it is their work that concerns Mr. Brown. Read the rest of this entry »