Wrod Play

After hearing about 40-50 papers (including my own) at several conferences the past few months, I was amazed at the number of people who started off their presentation by saying: "And then I did this Google search on the term xyz, which gave me this many results, blablabla...". I presume that most of the presenters saw the act of preliminary googling – that is, before a wiki-ing of the definition is undertaken – as a confirmation of the validity, currency and popularity of the word or term in question. One young designer from Berlin even more amazingly admitted that she had only started googling the word "redesign" after her word processing programme had "put this funny little red zigzag line" underneath it (this shocking revelation then paralyzed my mind to such degree that I was no longer able point out that "redesign" is not a German word).

And there does seem to lie a certain common sense in the assumption that if enough people include a certain word in their private or official websites, this word does indeed exist and is in contemporary use (the last word I googled was "artificialization", because I had not found any translation for the German "Verkünstlichung", leading me to think that I had just imagined both words – but Google did spew out a whopping 635 and 395 results, respectively).

So the word exists, but what if you've just spelled it incorrectly, along with the rest of the "smart mob"? It's a no-longer-that-well-kept secret that on eBay, including speling (sic!) mistakes in your search will give you less results, but also less co-bidders, and thus a higher chance of a successful bid. So let's see: Googling the word "design" produces 1,020,000,000 results, while typing "desgin" still gives me a spectacular 1,910,000 results, such as "Web Desgin Templates", "Desgin Concept Jewellery" and "Interesting Books on Desgin". Or, if you want to know more about "deisgn" (790,000 hits), how about the book "Konstantin Grcic Industrial Deisgn" or the "Deisgn Award Scheme" or how about joining a "Web Deisgn User Group"? And rather than merely calling for a correction of the spelling mistakes, I propose that both variations of "design" should constitute completely new words, which could be used to signal subtle sub-nuances of the original: "desgin" could for example could label the design that originates after two Gin Tonics, while "deisgn" (pronounced "day-ee-sgn") would indicate some kind of divine intervention in the design process. Wiki entries are to follow.