Intelligent Design

[4 March 2007 - Star Tribune - Minneapolis] On the heels of the information age, which seems to have just arrived, come suggestions that we've entered a new era, one in which creativity, design, aesthetics and the ability to forge emotional links will drive the American economy. Editorial writer Steve Berg recently discussed the trend with Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's newly formed College of Design, which incorporates architecture, landscape, cities, interiors, fashions and graphics into a singular effort. ... The information economy is still with us. But the paradoxical effect of the Internet is that it has made information so widely available that it holds no real economic value. Everybody can get incredible amounts of information, so there's no competitive advantage of having it. The idea of the design economy is that, for developed countries like ours, which cannot compete in a global marketplace on price or even quite often on the quality of a product, we have to compete on the basis of innovation, creativity and imagination, which takes you to design. By design, I don't mean just aesthetics but function and cultural adaptability. More