is the name of the website where you can find the creative community of plebsville. Well, yes – another community, as if there weren’t enough in the vast web 2.0 universe.But imagine you register for the community and three days later a person called HUGO rings to call your attention to a competition. That sounds special, doesn’t it? But exactly this is what happend to ROGER when he registered at designers are wankers! So needless to say that this is quite an outstanding personal approach.What you can find at plebsville is a collection of now 1,730 people that have the possibility to show their portfolio or get into contact with the other 1,729 creatives. The profile attributes have quite a playful approach and ask for things like:

Hardest lesson to learn, still to learn, home truths, inspiration, most fruitfull collaboration, future plans are for, style of approach that works and many more.

This leaves enough space for a not too tight and open-for-interpretation description that won’t get too serious and revealing.But why are designers wankers? It’s the name of »a book by product designer Lee McCormack that helps students, graduates and professionals gain further understanding of the creative industry. It’s also this site, and the community formed around it.« Still delighting is, that only the name promotes the book – you won’t find any link to an book shop or else. Rather they concentrate on really setting up an exchange platform that works: e. g. by employing »Gurus« that help other members:

»What is the point of all this? To sell the idea to you and to the creative industry in general that we all need to help each other – especially those without the skills that they need to enable fruitful creative endeavours – be they business, social or any related materials that aren’t dished out at college.«

Seems that here somebody really wants to change something in design education and practice. At a press trip for the »Torino World Design Capital 2008« thing ROGER had the chance to meet Robert Urquhart, who is editor and HUGO for plebsville and also working for the design magazine GRAFIK. His taste for strange German culture like »André Rieu« (even if he’s Dutch) or »Die Bettwurst« and his ideas about design show that there’s something special going on here for sure.Probably there will be a review on the book at ROGER LiVE soon.