DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1928 Conference Proceedings
Prototyping new thinking
What is the Future of Industrial Design?
In the Prototyping the Future this was expressed in many courses such as ‘Thinking
outside the box’, ‘Strategic design together with governments’, ‘Agonistic democracy’,
‘Consumer insights, trends and segmentation’, ‘Storytelling’ and the ‘Philosophy of
reflective practice’.
The workshop ‘Agonistic Democracy, Design, and the Environment’ held by Carl
DiSalvo 2 , explored how different models of democracy inform design tactics. Models of
agonistic democracy and deliberative democracy were examined and investigated how
these contrasting models of democracy could be used as generative frames for the
development of design programs around issues of environmental monitoring. The
objective of the workshop was to challenge and broaden our ideas of how to support
democratic action through design, and imagine new forms of agonistic political design
that engages environmental issues.
What this workshop has highlighted is the complexity of life in the work place and
especially in design where concepts and ideas are not easily measured.
Much of how democracy is applied in the design World is dependent of the working teams
and the personalities and relationships within the company or organisations strategies.
Design is emotional and effecting the senses so it's even more difficult to obtain a rational
decision within project groups. Even when decisions are made, the course it takes can
still be subject to change at different levels of development. Design & democracy has
shown to be active and variable at various stages of a design process.(15/6)
An other workshop, ‘Strategic Design: governance, decision making, and design
practice’, held by Bryan Boyer and Marco Steinberg 3 , aimed at showing how design could
affect political decision making and our future societies. Their assumption was that
European society is at the beginning of a long change that will alter some of the
fundamental assumptions of daily life. Governments of the 21st century will be
redesigned to meet these challenges, opening up new roles for strategic designers.
Today's challenges have multiple owners; they are riddled with legacy issues; they are of
a scale that transcends normal innovation challenges; and they are continually evolving.
While traditional models of innovation and design have focused on optimizing individual
parts, we have not been able to transition our capabilities to address the “architecture of
the problem.” Big picture dynamics will govern our future. In the coming decades,
designers will increasingly find themselves working for governments on large-scale
challenges. This will require new skills in facilitation, ethnography, systems analysis, and
the ability to skillfully integrate diverse inputs.
The design profession has come far from talking about wicked problems or even from
saying that designers can start solving these problems by asking the right questions. Now
the aim was explicitly to give governments and decision makers the tools to do something
about these multifaceted problems, and not just to ask questions.
I think this course was of great help to both introduce a direct application of design
thinking and to reinforce notions of the process already introduced in courses given
earlier this year in IDI. I was a little unsure before about how design management or
thinking differed from conventional management and didn’t really understand the value
2 Assistant professor, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology,
3 Design lead and Strategic Design Director of Sitra: The Finnish Innovation Fund, Finland