Are millennials forging a distinct new design ethos?

Yes and no…

The two examples you cite have more to do with information technology and social network building than design, in my opinion.

I do think that a new design ethos is emerging, with more attention paid to sustainability and somewhat of a trend toward higher-quality, less throw-away items. (Check out Platform 21′s repair manifesto: http://boingboing.net/2009/03/03/repair-manifesto.html)
We’re struggling, though, for the innovation and strong forms of past movements like Postmodernism and the International style.

Monday, November 29 at 12:36pm

In terms of aesthetics, I don’t think there’s a clear new movement or style…yet. But there is definitely something important happening, and that’s the unraveling of hierarchies, and the development of a strong DIY ethic. It used to be that a small group of people held the keys to power, but now all that’s required to create significant change in the world is a good idea and the basic skills to implement it. If others think your idea has value, it has the potential to go viral. So, I would say that there are some shared values being developed – a healthy disrespect for tradition and formality, and a belief that individuals have the ability to do things for themselves. As a counterpoint to the apathy and cynicism of years past, it’s good to see.

Previous design movements, like modernism, were of course rooted in larger political, academic, and cultural changes. I think we’re still in the early days of this new movement, and that an identifiable style may yet emerge.

Monday, November 29 at 1:49pm

Carly, I’m really glad you brought up Platform 21′s Repair Manifesto, as I think it’s extremely germane to the topic. It makes me think, in turn, of the rapidly broadening interest in maker culture. Is the ability to make and fix things yourself a part of the millennial design ethos?

This speaks to the idea of a resurgence in craft more generally, which I think is the result of technological growth not despite it. In a piece called “We’re All Coders Now” (warning: PDF) in the current Wired, Clive Thompson suggests that programming should be–and can be–like building with Legos or cooking. Could we think about design by millennials in the same way, as a more populist discipline, a kind of techno-craft?

Tuesday, November 30 at 12:21am

Millennials definitely have a new ethos in their approach to design, but the time of cohesive movements is over, and that ethos rejects style and aesthetics outright.

When I look at students and young designers, I consistently see a commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative design for social change. And all designers are more willing to move outside of their known tools in order to respond to greater expectations.

Despite this consistency of thought, there is virtually no discussion about it as a new movement, because millennials also feel little animosity towards older generations (whereas Gen-Xers like me still bear a grudge against Baby Boomers for ruining everything, but I digress…). And across the board, in our contemporary culture, attitudes are polled rather than spoken clearly and with hierarchy.

As for style and aesthetics, design sheds both as it becomes more collaborative. If everyone has an equal say in designing something, there is no one hand that is visible in the end. Interestingly, this has led to a premium on DIY-style design (handwritten, handmade, three-dimensional) in the commercial world and amateur design (Times New Roman, centered text, flatness, defaults) in the highbrow design world.

In the end, however, I think designers’ tools and platforms determine what things look like more than any kind of agreed-upon aesthetic. What I hope millennials will do is diversify those tools and platforms and release us from the aesthetics that come attached to them.

Tuesday, November 30 at 12:34am

perhaps design is a little more wide open, as the barriers to entry are lower, but architecture is a notoriously slow profession—insofar as it requires a long period of education and apprenticeship to establish a practice—and so the “young” leaders of the profession are generally in or around their 40s, and thus older than most “millennials.” given time, i’m sure millennials will “shape” design, but the characteristics you associate with them (emphasis on green building, technology, public service) have histories that predate their emergence.

that said, i’m old[er].

Tuesday, November 30 at 12:40pm

The opportunity—vs. the will— to design is so tied to the accessibility of tools and one’s economic situation that it muddies any discussion of whether a new aesthetic is evolving (which btw, I agree with Tim on his assessment on that front).

Millenials grew up with technology’s widespread accessibility and minimal entry costs. Their fluency in bits and bytes is unparalleled, so no wonder they really shine with interactive design—when using a tech device is as common as breathing, it just becomes an extra limb. If those tools were around for someone like the Eames—who leveraged their tech of the time, the ability to mass-produce— I don’t doubt they would have done amazing things, too. But they weren’t. They are now, they’re Millenials weapon of choice (vs. traditional manual skills), so they’re messing with them and creating programs like Facebook—just as 50 years ago someone would mess with a car’s engine or rebuild a radio. Interestingly, I feel design’s current overall proclivity toward tech has fueled a swing the other way, prompting the rise in interest in Etsy and things of a handmade providence. (And Millenials don’t have the DIY market cornered: It’s a fundamental American trait and something creatives have always had to do – see punk in the 70s, the indie and rave scenes in the 80s, and the ’zine explosion in the 90s, just for starters.)

When you get to it, Mark Zuckerberg and Napster’s Shawn Fanning (remember him?) are just Generation 2.0 of the equally brilliant and bratty (and distinctly non-Millenial) Jobs and Gates, who were as busy tinkering in their dorm rooms and garages in the 70s.

The real heart of all of this is money, though. The design field—like all art fields—is still a middle-class-and-above endeavor if you hope to do it as more than a hobby. The path is more open than before, but for the majority of folks you still need to be able to afford the tools and the time to create (tough if you’re working two jobs to pay your tuition, say, or to feed your family). You have to be self-centered, like all good artists are. When you’re young—i.e. before the responsibilities of a mortgage and children and elderly parents kick in—it’s easier (an annoying fact that this Xer’s finding out). So if Millenials are optimism, civic-minded, and driven to challenge norms, awesome. But it’s also the role “young people” have played in society since the start of time.

Wednesday, December 1 at 8:12am

Actually, what about Steampunk? Does that constitute a design movement at this point? I suppose its origins lie among the fantasy lit / gamer set, but now it’s mainstreaming on most of the creative blogs and across Twitter. I actually met a guy wearing steampunk goggles and carrying a wooden staff on the DC metro a few months ago…

So, entertaining the idea that Steampunk is a distinct design ethos, what are the principles of this ethos? I’d say:
1. durability (as aforementioned)
2. neo-romanticism- the whole Steampunk aesthetic concept is a riff on nineteenth and early twentieth century German industrial design.
3. whimsy- Especially as millennials enter the workforce, there will be more chafing against the buttoned-down ‘professional’ work culture that is. When we see unnecessary institutions that we also have a good chance of taking down, we try to do it. These days, when it comes to doing things for fun, Gen Y is boss, and it’s not just ’cause we’re young.
This brings me to 4. Quality of experience. Money may be an underpinning factor, but this generation, on the whole, tends to grasp that having a good quality of life is why one earns money, and that such artificial currency is a means to an end- and aesthetic detail does rule the Steampunk movement. It’s more of a ‘why not’ kind of endeavor than anything else.
5. Here’s that DIY thing again.

Thursday, December 2 at 12:17am

First time posting, woot!

I think it may be (note: MAY be) disingenuous to say the millennials popularized Facebook and got Barack Obama elected. The way I view it is that Facebook and Obama found ways to tap into that audience better as part of an overall domination strategy fueled by loads of cash and connections.

That said, I don’t think it’s as much a keen sense of design, but rather a discrete sense of intrinsic motivation and growing global awareness that are forging a new ethos.

We agree on something: There is a new ethos that is foundational to this generation. I just don’t think it’s necessarily restricted to calling it a “design ethos,” but rather a worldview–covering every aspect of what life means. Perhaps the sticking point for me is that the term doesn’t seem to contain the full weight of what the millennials are carrying in their collective consciousness.

One could retort here, “Everything is design, design is everything,” and we could then have a conversation about that :).

Thus, millenialls aren’t necessarily shaping a discrete approach to design, but a discrete approach to interaction with the world, and that’s having repercussion on the way we design for, communicate with, and empower them.

Friday, December 3 at 6:12pm

I think there’s some degree of consensus among the commenters here that there’s no obvious unifying aesthetic sensibility among millennials (at least not yet)–not in the way that, say, Raymond Loewy’s whooshy streamlined elegance or David Carson’s fractured type experiments seemed representative of what was happening at that moment in design and in the broader culture at large. And perhaps, as Juliette suggests, the time for cohesive movements is over. Maybe digital culture has fragmented us into so many niche specialty groups that it’s a fool’s errand to search for an overarching look and feel that says something meaningful about who we are. Maybe.

And yet the same time, it also sounds like there’s considerable agreement about what a millennial ethos looks like–that there are core millennial values that have clear implications as they relate to design. These include: a DIY sensibility that places greater value on being able to make and repair things oneself, breaking down barriers between disciplines (and by extension, I think, seeing everything in terms of design), an easy facility with technology, a concern with sustainability and the implications of a throwaway consumer culture, a collaborative energy, and an overall desire to effect social change in a pragmatic (read: non-60s) way. Yes, many of these characteristics predate the millennials, and many of them can also be found in older folks around today, but this is the millennial package.

As millennials age, I wonder how this orientation will inform what they choose to design, and how. For me, Apple represents probably the premier example of mass-market design today, in terms of how it works and what it looks like. If someone says “Apple design,” you know what that means. If Mark Zuckerberg is the Steve Jobs of the millennials, then I wonder what Facebook design might come to mean in a generation’s time.

Friday, December 3 at 8:52pm