So I netflixed (which is now a verb btw) this movie over the weekend and thought it was hilarious. It was "Dumb and Dumber" type of funny, so it almost turned me off, then as I watched more I thought wait a second, there is something really important here.
I will quickly sum it up as a Woody Allen "Sleeper" for the generation nexters. Luke Wilson's character who was an average slacker his whole life is put to sleep in a military experiment, but doesn't get woken up until 2530 or some ridiculous year.
He is in a dystopia with a society that is completely dumbed down. I don't want to spoil the humor so you have to watch it to see how Mike Judge portrays the dumbness of people in the future. TV, Brand names, and corporations have taken over, everybody speaks in slang and people have names like Frito and Mountain Dew.
So what does this all have to do with design? Well... there was this one scene when Luke Wilson is at a clinic and needs assistance. The nurse at the place looks and assists him by using a series of icons instead of reading instructions or speaking to him. So here is the question of the day and how this relates back to design:
IF DESIGN IS SUPPOSED TO MAKE THINGS EASIER AND MORE EFFICIENT, DOES IT ALSO MAKE US DUMBER?
We streamline messages, stories, interfaces, and spaces for ease of use, understanding, and efficiency right? But in this movie all these advances led to a homogenized dumb society. Personal example: I bought a course reader for a sociology class and it was mostly dumbed down cartoons of sociological theories described in single sentence bulleted content. This was a 400 level class...
Ok, so all you artsy/design intellectuals out there are thinking, WTF - its a Mike Judge movie, not a Julian Schnabel film, but its food for thought.... what do you think?
