Something recently made me aware that there seems to be a dearth of Industrial Designers involved in online communities centered around intangible media and discussing the issues they’re currently facing. I suspect there are plenty of designers huddled around car websites, sneaker sites or other tangible product-centric communities, but there don’t appear to be very many elsewhere. I didn’t realize this until Bruce Nussbaum posted an entry, “Xbox, Wii, PS3–Gamers of the World, Unite!” (Link), that effectively amounted to him quoting a comment I’d made and then associating me with the “gaming community”.

While it’s flattering that Nussbaum (of all people) should find what I have to say worth repeating on his BusinessWeek blog, I got the sense that he was missing something by casually slapping a tag on me. Way I see it, doing so misses a larger observation: Designers should be engaged in all creative communities – especially media-based ones – to learn from them and try to apply what they learn. Because at some point (Industrial) Designers will be confronted with the same issues facing musicians, filmmakers, and game developers.

In case the designers among you haven’t realized it, this blog covers a lot of territory and for just that purpose. I don’t post about DRM because I care about music labels and film studios. I follow the intellectual property debate because, as I’ve pointed out in a number of posts and comments, at some point those issues will be Design issues. It may be Treehugger and Absolut providing “downloadable” designs now, but it’ll be something more before we know it.