DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1926 Conference Proceedings
What is the Future of Industrial Design?
challenge is, as Donald Norman (2011, 13) points out, to find the right level between
complexity and over-simplification. If we over-simplify things too much, they are viewed
as dull and uneventful, if the level of complexity is too high, we get confused.
So what new skills are needed?
In the Prototyping the Future project we aimed to go deeper than the national innovation
policies’ general descriptions and to define specific new skills that are needed. These
were grouped in two types; those, which are relevant to any professional in today’s
society, and those relevant within design.
The group of design specific skills included courses such as ‘Smart materials’,
‘Documentary photography’ or ‘Information design and mapping’.
Throughout the course I had the opportunity to learn about Piezoelectric materials,
Shape-memory Alloys, Shape-memory Polymers, Smart Gels and Magnetostrictive
Materials. All were very interesting and very new for me. I learnt about the current
application, future possibilities and current limitation of each of the materials mentioned
above and in depth background information about each material. Furthermore seeing
these materials work in person was amazing.[…]This course has not only made me a
better designer, but also more intelligent designer, as I am not just reading information
from the web and making my own assumptions.[…]This course has opened my mind to
what materials can add to my designs and helped me justify my thinking, which is that
materials can have multifunction purposes. I feel that every designer should have this
knowledge as it will help us to innovate and create new solutions to current issues within
the markets, this is essential to separate us from other designers. (6/4)
As an interaction designer, we need a good way to document our research and design
process, in order to understand and help others to understand the user experience.
Documentary photography is definitely an essential skill for us to collect and
communicate.” (9/1)
The general skills where in areas where the designers felt more challenged than before.
Many designers demand increased knowledge in the area of ‘Academic writing’, a very
natural reaction to the academisation of the profession. Many also pushed for the
workshop in ‘Entrepreneurship’, which was a week’s crash course in in putting up your
own enterprise or becoming self-employed, held by a business coach and supported by
alumni who had set up their own businesses, which were also used as case examples.
The general thinking is that with good examples the entire mental model of designers can
be changed so that it becomes more entrepreneurial in spirit, which will be needed no
matter if the designers decide to start their own business or not.
This entrepreneurial spirit can also be seen in the fact that designers are more and more
interested in how they can present their work, even to audiences with very little previous
knowledge on the topic. The workshop on “Presentation – Body language, improvisation
and humour”, held by a local director, playwrite and presentation consultant, aimed at
addressing this.
When defining what new skills are needed the challenge eventually was not to define
new topics, but to agree on which ones are the most crucial ones and even more