The article discusses a shift away from following design trends dictated by technology towards embracing hands-on, tactile, and personal design processes.
It criticizes designers who blindly adopt popular aesthetics instead of creating their own unique identities.
An example highlighted is Airbnb's Lava icon format, which, while technically innovative, is seen as just another passing trend.
The article emphasizes the need for designers to reclaim creativity from tech giants and focus on raw, handmade, and unpredictable approaches.
It suggests engaging in hands-on techniques like hand sketching, suminagashi, gelli printing, block printing, and photocopy transfer to reignite creativity.
Other suggested techniques include stop-motion microinteractions, analog collage, using film photography as texture source, hand-lettering with intentional inconsistency, and material experiments with failure in mind.
The article argues that these techniques offer a philosophical stance, resisting convenience and demanding time, intention, and effort to restore meaning to design work.
It encourages designers to create trends based on passion, intuition, resistance, and imperfection, rather than imitating machines, to bring back the value and authenticity in design.
The conclusion calls for designers to prioritize getting 'hands dirty,' making mistakes, challenging conventions, and finding meaning in the design process itself to shape future trends authentically.
Ultimately, the article advocates for a design approach driven by passion and imperfection, rather than conforming to tech-driven mandates, to create meaningful and trendsetting designs.