It's Monday, and as we're all getting ready to start our weeks, getting ready to start working on our products, or with our clients – anyway, going out there and designing stuff – I'm going to try to keep it short and sweet. What I'm going to do specifically is lay a little aphorism on you, which I hope you'll think about as you go about your business. Here it is:

The way we talk about design changes what design is.

And if that's too Zen or Heideggerian for you, let's get practical. Why are all of our clients coming to us now talking about the power of social networking? It's because we've been talking about it for so long. Thousands upon thousands of blog posts have for years now been extolling the virtues of tribe-building, grass-roots social marketing, and the post-brand branding strategies to business decision makers.

And all the talking worked. Now, non-designers and non-technorati have been convinced that indeed the social media revolution has changed the way all of these important design activities need to be conducted, and have done so, I believe, swept up in a fervor emergent from the blog-level discussions of designers and technology advocates.

You can draw a parallel to most social phenomena here: from green design revolution to the French Revolution. These things took off precisely because people kept giving reasons why they should, compelling others until critical mass was reached.

If the way we talk about things influences the way things are, then every blog post is a vote: A vote for one of the possible ways that design could be. And if we don't just love the current state of the nation, we need to be casting our votes every day for the future shape of the discipline.

I recently read Jennifer van der Meer's thought-provoking piece, The Crowd Will Save Us: How the green movement taps participatory networks to drive innovation at Core77.

TCWSU is an appeal to marry up two significant and recent cultural developments which have affected nearly everyone in the design profession, namely, the "green movement" and design strategies employing social networking. The first really compelling bit of her argument is this:

Over 50% of consumers want greener, more natural [e.g.] housing cleaners, but only 5% actually purchase this category of product: consumers do not want tradeoffs. ...green-leaning consumers are looking for proven efficacy, broad availability, comparable price, and a brand they know and trust. They're not willing to settle for a product that performs less than a more eco-unfriendly alternative.

This statistic offers up something deep for us to think about: The (relatively) recent groundswell of interest in environmentally friendly product design is, while certainly "real," nevertheless only marginally capable of altering whatever practical or psychological norms motivate individuals to actually buy things.

The rest of TCWSU deals with some practical strategies about how social innovations in design might help us solve this complicated psychological problem afflicting products and brands, and rightly so. In addition to her practical conclusions, though, this strange statistic should certainly tell us something theoretical or psychological.

Namely, I wonder why, exactly, the psychological dependence on extant brands as the guarantor of quality isn't overcome by people's self-professed desire for greener products?

It's not you, it's me (via).

Several possible reasons occurred to me:

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