I just re-discovered Google Trends — it’s actually pretty fun to use. Google Trends “aims to provide insight into broad search patterns,” according to the site. I did a couple of tests.
First I entered design, doing and thinking. According to Trends, searching for design is very popular; doing and thinking, not so much. In fact, design is so much more popular (in search) than doing and thinking that you can’t even see the fluctuation in doing and thinking search, if you keep design in the picture.
There appears to be a periodic dip in design interest at the end of the year. Since 9 of the top 10 design search cities are in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, it’s reasonable to assume that this has something to do with the Christmas season. It probably correlates with trying to find a job. Google Trends think so too, as the chart with job added to it indicates. In fact it implies that the search interest in design is held up by the search interest in a job.
So then I decided to look for design-related content that didn’t have to do with jobs. It seemed like a Google Sets kind of a thing to do, but I couldn’t figure out a way of excluding “job” from the set. I ended up just doing a regular Search for design, -job, -work, -employ, which returned a handful of interesting things, among them designboom.com — which I have to admit I didn’t really get but looked fun.
Next I looked up design altruism which did dig up some gems from David Stairs, among them an abstract for an article that appears to deal with design values, and a blog post from him on Designers Without Borders. DWB appears to be an organization dedicated to improving computer literacy in Africa. I have to admit, I couldn’t tell where design comes in, unless its the problem solving and creative processes needed to address this admirable goal, but its definitely far more profound than the standard “looking for a web design job?” search result.
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