In this era of mass customisation and user-creation, very often questions are raised whether everyone can be a designer and if this doesn’t mean a loss of quality? A very famous critique is the one of Andrew Keen, who argues on a Fast company article that:

The consequence of this design democracy is an ugly spectacle of deep purples and electric oranges. It’s a culture of me-me-me: my hideously personalized car, my hideously personalized sofa, my hideously personalized house. It’s that fat woman in the tight dress that only exaggerates her obesity. It’s that loud pick-up truck with the tinted windows and the tastelessly sexualized exhaust pipe.

But according to Matt Sinclair on the Fluid Forms blog, the critique above isn’t about design, but about taste! And this opens a whole new debate: what is ‘good’ taste? According to him, the question of whether joe public can be designer, depends on how one defines design:

Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. Consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb – something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it.

New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping.