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Future, well-being, interdependence: key-words for contemporaneous design
6. The challenges for contemporaneous design
Thinking about design as a terrain of expression of more than one and of different
cultures, widens the field of possibilities of design as practice and transforms it,
conducting it throughout challenges always more important and involving. We
wanted to express some of these possibilities in the hope that these stimulating
paths of research could accompany our discipline towards the confirmation of its
utility, shared more and more, and towards products and services each time more
adequate to the transformations that society looks for.
The complexity of the market, of the social and of the integration between
market and social, requires the capacity of systematically molding reality, and
oblige the designer to assume the capacity of mediating between knowledge
and necessities (CELASCHI, 2008). Especially nowadays, it is no longer the time to
accept that design receives the inputs of its action only through the functions that
interpret the reality of its use (like marketing, engineering, criticism, intellectual
culture). The challenge of innovation requires and offers to design a role of “firstrate”,
the necessity and opportunity of researching and keeping a direct contact
with the receivers the project (market), of establishing direct relations with the
responsible for the decision taking of the company, and not only with the people of
the intermediary management functions, of dialoguing directly with the knowledge
producers (centers of research and universities) and not only with the interpreters
of such knowledge. A role that is only possible to be sustained throughout a
rapid and strong cultural maturity of the designer, that leaves the technical role
of mediator of mediators (marketing, technical, commercial, production) to try,
in a direct way, to conduct the offer of goods and services towards radical and
sustainable transformations.
The advanced design is the materialization of the mixture between project
knowledge and future studies. It offers some possible directions to these challenges:
at first place, the clarification that the innovation cannot be continuous and that,
in the continuous innovation, it becomes indispensable knowing to produce semimanufactures
and components for the innovation and renouncing to the role of
single creator to establish creative relations with other types of knowledge and with
Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 105-130
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