Oh, new Facebooks profile: when everybody’s creative… then everybody’s creative?

Just a quick thought on the new Facebook profile redesign. Oh, first: no one seems to hate it. That’s a nice surprise.  Very clever, them Facebooks: more pretty pictures, add a few more categories you’ve got to pay attention to at the top (e.g. hometown? workplace?) that tell advertisers a whole lot, add a few more categories that tell them even more (I’m a marathoner who loves the New York Football Giants! Sell me things!)… well done.

But the visual element of the thing seems to have caused more people in my network to actually care to update their profiles, moreso than any other redesign (and this is an actual design!) that I can remember. One (meaning me) might think “only so many of my favorite musicians are listed without a visitor having to ‘click for more,’ so who do I want to have above the fold!!” You know, more preening, essentially, that gives the illusion of productivity or even creativity as one puts on their best online outfit.

So it reminds me of one of my old old totally unoriginal original thoughts: what actually counts as creative, especially within closed systems? What I mean is like this: if you play with thisissand.com for a while and make a pretty damn cool picture within a very limited medium… who’s the “most” creative one here: the digital sand artist? the design studio that made the site? what of a person who actually goes out and makes real sand art pictures? what about hackers who bust shit up (e.g.): where are they placed relative to the people who use a system/medium to its originator’s intent?

Maybe this is only worthwhile when talking about these closed things that tend to pop up in tech-based areas. Or not: look at fashion. So this is not at all a new question, but whatever. To contrast, think of keyboard instruments or guitars or writing: you can never be the best in the world at any of those things, not even in a highly structured and codified genre like “classical guitar.” But in these more restricted media, I could easily master thisissand or Donkey Kong, or  like, read the OKCupid blog and put together a maximally effective online dating profile.

I guess I want to say that we’re all thinking and we’re all playing a bit more, and that can’t be bad, even if it may or may not be creative in the most stringent sense. In his TED talk on data visualization, David McCandless mentions how he, over years and years, just developed a design literacy so that when he started putting together infographs, he knew what to look for.

So I guess I’m not hating. I just think it’s funny. In an Economist year-end wrap up, Paola Antonelli predicts, essentially, that in 2036, design’s role and influence in society will be central and understood as non-frivolous. Perhaps a young population playing around within carefully designed platforms, as natural as breathing, is part of that movement.