BLENDIN - Design News Inshort 4+

Love the idea but execution is disappointing

The idea is perfect and just the type of application I would love. But after just a few minutes I was left scratching my head about what it actually is and why so many art and design influencers are promoting it.

I’ve been creative placemaking and museum professional for the past 20 years. I searched “placemaking” and it brought up a single article on “peacemaking.” Okay, I get that search can be tough to effectively integrate into websites but literally 2 minutes later when I decided to abandon search and check out the “Art” tab I stumbled upon an article with “placemaking” actually in its title.

Further scrolling on the “Art” tab I come across a LA Times article about Olympic swimmers confronting a problem in the Seine beside water quality. This piqued my interest because it probably had something to do with art and design, right? Nope, it was an article about the current. Admittedly there was a fleeting reference to Impressionists and post-impressionists depicting the river in their paintings but it’s probably not an article that I would typically read if I was seeking out art and design news.

Few other observations:

The next LA Times article on the app’s “Art” tab was about blocking political fundraising spam adds. When I clicked, it was being a paywall.

Lots of articles are not in English and there’s no translation mechanism that I could find.

I think it would be interesting if UGC was integrated or at least visitors could vote articles up or down like Reddit did a couple decades ago.

I love the idea of this app but it has a lot of work ahead to tighten it up to be useful to me.