Are You Applying to Kanye West’s DONDA Startup?

Last week Kanye West went stream-of-consciousness on Twitter in a discussion that included the announcement of a new design company to be called DONDA after his mother, the late Donda West. It got an amazing amount of media coverage across news and entertainment genres and is a pretty interesting example of Kanye's take on the world, displaying moments of naivete and brilliance in close proximity. My only real question at this point is whether or not I should apply.

Kanye West's Twitter account has been a great outlet for Kanye's willingness to go off the cuff and for providing both fans and detractors with fresh material on a regular basis. However, his announcement of the DONDA project covered so much ground that writers seemed to pick and choose based on their job assignments. A fashion writer for the Telegraph wrote an article focused on Kanye's fashion statements with no mention of DONDA. A tech writer for the Guardian began by fixating on "app guys" from a diverse list of career/skill sets Kanye wishes to include. Many made fun of it all while others simply described and quoted Kanye's tweets because this material sells itself.

I posted all of Kanye's 2012 tweets on Storify through January 7th with the DONDA announcement sprawling from January 4th to 5th. It's a bit confusing because Storify's got the date stamps wrong on the displayed version.  The tweets are in reverse chronological order and the second to last tweet ends the DONDA announcement though I believe that the final tweet, made two days later, "The world is our office," is also a statement about DONDA.

If you go through the whole account you'll see that, in building to and describing DONDA, he ties together such topics as his music career, his strong interest in design and fashion, his love for his mom and her fashion influence, his disappointment with his educational experiences, his desire to do good in the world, his belief that design can be a force for good when applied to broken systems and the unspoken reality that he has capital and contacts and could actually start something like this if he wished. What happens after that is anyone's guess.

It's understandable that people consider the idea of a 22 division design firm that will include such diverse individuals as bankers, architects, social media experts, DJs, car designers and doctors as absurd. Yet, if we step back from the organizational specifics, his overall vision is in keeping with what a lot of forward thinking people have been exploring for quite a while.

Fast Company's Co-Design is one place where you can see such thinking at work including the commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and the conviction that many of our problems can be solved through design-oriented thinking even outside the traditional realms of design.

Kanye West's love of design and fashion has been evident for quite some time. Though that love and, even, obsession has been evident in a fashion sense, his design interests have also been visible from the beginning of his blogging activities to guest editing an issue of Complex to his current work on a "new 7 screen experience."

So when West announced DONDA, I scoffed a bit at the specifics of a 22 division firm but I also started thinking about what I would send in as an application because I believe he's serious. Plus, I'm a real sucker for a utopian vision that has guaranteed initial funding.

How about you? Are you applying for DONDA?

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and blogs at All World Dance and This Business of Blogging. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.