The Design Council puts brand first 3 Jan 2007

The Design Council's redesigned site features a series of new sections, including some on user-centred design, interaction design, inclusive design and service design.

Unfortunately the majority of this new material is misleading, confusing or just plain wrong. Take the new experience design section for example, which is introduced as follows:

"Experience design concentrates on moments of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create. For customers, all these moments of corporate experience combine to shape perceptions, motivate their brand commitment and influence the likelihood of repurchase in the future."

As you can see, this description emphasises the importance of brands and corporations over people / users - a theme that is common amongst the new articles. As a result, the DC's redesign has drawn much criticism from the user experience community. Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path, for example, blogged the following response:

"The unfortunate company-centeredness of the Design Council's discussion of brand is in evidence in their 13 examples - most of these are explicit branding ploys, attempts by various companies to impress their brand upon customers through environmental design that suffocates any attempt by customers to express themselves, their desires, what they as people want to accomplish."

[via Putting People First]