Paula Thornton just emailed her experience design list (which is different from AIGA's experience design list) about an article that appeared in the December 8th issue of Fortune: From Drab to Fab.

Is it just me, or is design getting some fab press? In late October, there was a design issue of Newsweek. Then at the end of November, there was a design issue of the New York Times Magazine. This Fortune article is a nice complement. Some highlights from this piece:

How do the savviest companies come up with designs that excite consumers and spur sales? For starters, they don't make the design department a product's last stop after it has already passed through the engineering and manufacturing departments. ...

In fact, if you look at the corporate ranks of some of the biggest companies in the country, chances are becoming greater that you'll find a design professional somewhere in there. Take Claudia Kotchka, whom Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford's business and engineering schools, calls "the most powerful design executive in the country." Two years ago Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley promoted Kotchkawho once headed P&G's design staffto the newly created position of vice president of design innovation and strategy. ...

As designers become more worldly, they and their bosses are starting to realize that many skills, such as interpreting customer needs and rapid prototyping, can extend beyond the confines of the design department. "Design has to be seen as a cultural cornerstoneit can't report to marketing," says Herbst Lazar Bell's Dziersk. "There's an argument that in the next ten years, marketing will report to design." Can a new, better-designed world be far behind?

It is pieces like this that make me think that the folks who are avoiding design for its connotation (like peterme and Richard Saul Wurman) should consider giving design another chance.

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