Peterme on the Dark Side of Design

I love the fact that blog comments and resulting discussion are often as illuminating as the post they reference. Take Peter Merholz’s reaction to the exact same comment by Dirk Knemeyer on Digital Web that I mentioned in my recent post: Give up Control or You’ll Lose it Forever: Experience Designers Beware – Web 2.0 Interfaces Change Everything.

I think Peter makes some interesting points here, and I’m glad that he’s talking frank about design. He picks up the “control of content” thread that I talked about as well as talking about what he calls “designer arrogance” and a “weakness for styling”. I agree with his comment that this stuff is dealt with by all of us, and I think that without regular introspection we all fall victim to these things now and again. His post reminded me of a call-to-action I made recently concerning articulating and discussing design: The Difficulty with Articulating Design.