DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1922 Conference Proceedings
What is the Future of Industrial Design?
In order to define future needs of industrial design a big project was set up and started in
2010. The project was called ‘Prototyping the Future’, involving all students, staff and
faculty in strategic development of the school. The idea was to identify what the future of
industrial design education should include, then give a one week course or workshop in
these topics with the worlds best teachers and with the highest possible quality, and then
to analyze the results together and make decisions about future education based on the
knowledge from the prototype. Empiria from this project is used as the basis for this
paper.
Through a set of initial workshops we first identified hundreds of future areas of industrial
design. These were then distilled by a project team, consisting of representation from
students, staff and faculty. Some of the suggested areas were very alike, and could
therefore be consolidated. Other topics, such as sustainability, innovation or
multiculturalism, were in their basic form already considered to be part of the current
curricula and foundational, and not considered new topics, and therefore not included in
the project. For the remaining ones there was a vote on which ones to include and which
to exclude. In the end we had distilled the twenty most strategic topics, which were
executed as one-week workshops. The workshops were documented and the results
later analyzed.
This paper uses empirical material from these initial workshops by 32 faculty members in
the area of design. This material was all about generating an understanding of what
ought to be there, what the future of industrial design should be like. This material was
also used in planning the actual Prototyping the Future week, and as a basis when
defining which courses should be given. In addition this paper refers to personal written
reflections of 102 members of faculty and students. These reflections were written after
the one-week workshops had been given, and hence reflect either on how well these
original criterions were met (in the case of the faculty members that participated in the
initial workshops) or how the content of these courses would be beneficial for design and
the individual designer (students, staff and faculty).
The material from the initial workshops was mostly documented as working groups, and
hence there are no direct quotes from that material in this paper (although it has been
heavily used). Excerpts from the personal reflections appear throughout the paper. They
are used anonymously with indication codes, where the first number indicates the number
of the workshop (1-20) the person has attended and the second number the member of
that group (in alphabetical order, 1-11).
We wanted to avoid that the Prototyping the Future workshops would become a mere
wish-list of unrealistic aspirations, rather than practically grounded examples of what new
knowledge in these areas would actually be. Two criteria for the workshops were
therefore inserted: 1) All the workshops were tutored by external professionals, the best
ones that we could find globally either from academia or industry. And 2) all workshops
were to be hands-on, involving all participants (of students and faculty in mixed groups)
rather than just one-way lecture series. To ensure this many of the workshops had a real
project to work on, questions put forward by the government, municipalities, companies
or research institutes.
Three areas of development
The process of Prototyping the Future showed three different areas of development in
industrial design. Firstly, there is a strong need to re-evaluate and to develop our own
artistic base. Secondly, new skills are needed. And thirdly, the theoretical developments