kenyatta:

Participate: Designing with User Generated Content

Nowadays, many of the tools of production and distribution used by graphic designers are available to the broader public. And not only are members of the public turning into amateur designers, they are also invited by professionals to contribute to their creative process. The book addresses the curiosity of the amateur of course but it also talks to professional designers (or artists) who fear that they might be trampled underfoot by distributed amateur creatives.

Participate is a introductory book for anyone who is interested in the impact that networked co-creativity has on design, graphic design but also on other fields such as typography, silk-screening, craft, fashion, advertising, etc. Each chapter analyzes one of the key components of participatory design: community (or what drives people to participate in the absence of a financial compensation), modularity (the groups of units that makes up a larger system), flexibility (making branding more elastic) and technology (or why code is ‘the new literacy.’)

This seems very much a book about community design as it relates to graphic design. Filing away under ‘useful.’

Read the rest of Regine’s review here. read more about the book here.