Worth a read: Wired's 'Why Getting It Wrong Is the Future of Design'

Wired has just published a series of short articles entitled 13 Lessons for Design's New Golden Age. While there are some interesting examples cited in the piece, the concluding article, ‘Why Getting It Wrong Is the Future of Design' by the former creative director of Wired magazine, Scott Dadich, feels like it has particular resonance for car design.

Dadich's Wrong Theory uses disruptive examples from the world of art, plus his own experience of working at Wired, to explain how design goes through phases: establishing a direction, creating a set of rules that define that direction and finally someone who dares to break from that direction.

His current example is that of smartphone design, which currently conforms to a set of extremely established rules and is crying out for a disruption. We'd argue that the same could be said for the dearth of me-too crossover designs that proliferate at present, seemingly designed to a set of extremely rigid criteria established as much by marketing teams as by designers.

Even the move towards coupe-crossovers, begun by BMW, has become normalized. So what's next? Perhaps that sketch that was ditched for not following the rules is exactly the 'wrong' sort of design that's needed to break the rules and take us in a new direction.

By Tom Phillips