It is what it is

(or...Are we done yet?)

What’s your deliverable? It’s a common question, as crass as it is self-evident. We deliver Design…24/7. But it’s a strange word – deliverable – with so many embedded assumptions. Someone else demands, requires, needs, wants, and ultimately pays (or doesn’t), but we always deliver. The verb makes sense, it’s the noun that’s the problem: what is this thing we are handing over?

On most business forms, Graphic Design is listed under Service Industries, so that much is clear: we deliver service. We service people, people in need of…design. Okay, so maybe it’s not so clear after all. Perhaps the problem is in the shifting definition of the design object. The material nature of the design object keeps slipping over the course of a project and from project to project, client to client, year to year, generation to generation.

2x4 is a collaborative group of creative directors, writers, and designers founded in 1994 by partners Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, and Georgianna Stout. With cutting-edge projects in virtually all graphic media-print, web, motion graphics, and environmental design, 2x4's trademark approach heavily emphasizes critical thinking and research. Known for intellectual content and explorations of rhetorical meaning, many of 2x4's projects question the nature of design and are as much about the thinking process behind each work as the finished product. This ideology, based on an almost algorithmic approach, is the foundation for 2x4's pioneering model for design, one that makes process the product." Joseph Rosa, Curator, Art Institute of Chicago.