Digital Inspirational Economy: The Dialectics of Design Work

• In Event: Labor Studies in the Digital Media Economy

Abstract

With the rise in design centric social media platforms, design blogs, and design inspiration aggregators, the term “inspiration” has become increasingly popular terminology for the creative work by designers that is served up across a digital ecology. Technology developers have leveraged the common design industry language of inspiration to describe the ways that these platforms and applications could fit within, perpetuate, and ultimately direct this design labor practice to happen among and within these sites. This empirical study zooms out to take a broader look at the continual shaping and reshaping of what I term the digital inspirational economy, where one designer's creative content becomes another designer's inspiration. As emerging systems for the distribution of design content, these platforms and the practices of enterprising designers illuminate the contours of evolving work practices and the ways in which designers are continually challenged to assert their economic value in the creative economy.

Author

• Leah Maureen Scolere, Colorado State University