Design Council help request
The Design Council are currently working on updating their website and they need your help. Please read over the request below and if you feel compelled please send Kerri some images of you at work. Please let her know that you found out through us, so she can keep tracks on who’s helped her, and who’s not.
Here’s her email to us:
I am working with the Design Council to update their website. We are creating a new section called ‘How designers work’ featuring real designers. I wonder if any members of your network would like to be involved? Or perhaps you have a bank of images ready for use!
I am looking for images of designers at work practising any of the following skills/approaches:
- Understanding users (inclusive, user-centred, ergonomics, co-creation);
- Research (design research, using video and audio, observation, ethnography, market research, academic research design in universities);
- Collaboration (using materials, technology, manufacturing/production, craft, sales);
- Visualisation (sketches, presentations);
- Prototyping (rapid prototyping, models);
- and any other approaches or practices will be welcome!
The images need to be high resolution – about 300 dpi and at least 15cm wide. Full captions including project description, client, design agency, and year, are essential.
In all instances the pictures will be set in context with an explanation of what it illustrates, which design agency is associated with creating the work illustrated and, if necessary with photographer credits.
Initially the images will be used to illustrate content explaining what design is, but they may also be relevant to future content, on the website, and in Design Council publications, exhibitions, and on films, which the Design Council makes.
My deadline to send all images to the Design Council is Thursday 11th March 2010.
Kind regards
Kerri
Kerri Miles
Freelance Picture Editor, working for
Design Council
www.designcouncil.org.uk
07946 399396
kerri.miles@btinternet.com
Comments
Comment from brizapie
Time March 6, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Dear Michael,
We are not personally looking for this ‘work’, but are merely passing on a request—as part of our collaborative approach in the design community—that we felt might interest our mailing list.
Yes you’re right, the Design Council are looking for free images, and the request comes from a freelance journalist, presumably without access to any budget to pay for them. I’d suggest, as you clearly have an issue with this, that you contact the journalist making the request and air your views to her, or even the Design Council themselves.
We felt, after having read the request and discussed it, that agencies wouldn’t mind taking some images in their offices to send to the DC who would then use those images to promote design to industry and so through giving they might receive. Maybe that was an incorrect view, but we prefer to think of ourselves as just helpful souls and the Design Council is paid to help our industry, so it seemed aligned to us.
FYI we only ever resist requests from agencies to post job adverts, but anything we feel will benefit our industry we will usually publish here, or through our mailing list. As I say, if you feel strongly enough to have a go at us for this, perhaps you should have a go at the Design Council too.
Regards
Brian
Comment from Michael Preston
Time March 6, 2010 at 12:46 am
Whilst I understand that budgets are tight, reading the message above really makes my blood boil!
If I’ve misunderstood then I apologise in advance, but it seems to me that you’re basically searching for free content for use on the Design Council, but for free, (I’m assuming this from the fact that there’s no mention of any payment for the use of the images; like I said If I’m wrong then I apologise).
If you are after some free content then this is absolutely appalling. What the hell is going on when the organisation responsible for encouraging good practice in design attempts to get people to work for free in exchange for, “if necessary with photographer credits”.
This is wrong on so many levels, as an ethical designer, (who’d never ask anyone to work for free) and as a working commercial photographer it leaves me virtually speechless.