If design:information as architecture:space,

If design:information as architecture:space – each for the masses, or for pieces of the masses, to be used, consumed, experienced by the many not the few – than shouldn't we offer design tours through The Great design solutions of our history? Design is experiential, people! Just like architecture. Design needs a bus, a quirky tour guide, 25 tourists with an afternoon to waste (and a neighbor who told them, "This was fun."). Where would the bus travel? Maybe to a corporate headquarters, where our guide explains how everything from the building's location to the personalities of it's employees to it's business cards were carefully planned to enhance it's identity. We'll survey it's intentions and then perform our own 'brand check' - when we survey our reactions, feelings, moods about the company. We could continue on to an example of a well-executed urban design, then successful product designs that before this moment so simply blended into our world but after our design tour will be heralded as artifacts of culture, and so on... I won't pretend that I'm qualified to completely answer this question.

Great, even good, design doesn't belong in museums, it belongs in the public, out among it's most accepting, at the same time most critical, audience. If we shut Great design up in four walls, how will we ever raise the design standard/sense of the masses? Are we expected to one-by-one (or two-by-two) hold the hands of potential advocates of design and lead them to the museums? No, we can't be expected to bring them to it, we must bring it to them.

More to come...