Design is about shaping the future and employing methods and strategies to steer society towards futures that are people-centric and sustainable. Design Futures looks at providing a critical and creative dialogue with society to serve to anticipate and design scenarios for future complexities and unknown possibilities.
MRes Research:
Michael Peter and Xin Wu
Design is about shaping the future, how can we employ our methods and strategies to steer
ourselves towards futures that are society centric and sustainable? Can we look forward to
provide a critical and creative dialogue with our future selves to anticipate and design
scenarios for future complexity and unknown possibilities?
Design futures aims to educate and span our imagination gap. How might we understand,
explore, and materialise complex wicked problems for the world we live in — socially, culturally, economically, politically, environmentally?
The ‘futures cone’ model was used to portray alternative futures by Hancock and Bezold
(1994), and was itself based on a taxonomy of futures by Henchey (1978), wherein four main
classes of future were discussed (possible, plausible, probable, preferable).
How do we design the future of safety?
Design Futures Radar
This sectorial-matrix can be used to contextualise and map future complexities and unknown
possibilities that are society centric and sustainable.
Modelled after Clive van Heerden’s Weak Signal Mapping diagram.
The vertical axis shows desirability of progressive or regressive design.
The horizontal axis shows time, identifying past, present, and future problems.
The concentric circles explores vicinity and scope of projects in relation to society.
Respectively, the four quadrants will start to visualise a desirable future, an undesirable future, an undesirable past, and a desirable past.
Key Issues
Socially: How does design become more genuine?
“I recently took my daughter to the NYC Transit Museum. More fascinating than the actual
subway cars was seeing a concentrated snapshot of simplistic branding and advertising from
the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond. Today, by contrast, branding has become more forceful,
prevalent, and highly produced, and yet it is quite homogeneous in its friendliness (which even borders on pseudo-optimistic), boldness, and efficiency. As the convergence between media and technology accelerates and is further integrated into every aspect of our lives, people will be barraged with an increasing volume of brand expressions. This will make us crave the simplicity and realness of yesteryear. Branding and design will, hopefully, be encouraged to build meaningful relationships between companies and people.” – Min Lew, principal of Base Design, designers of JFK’s Terminal 4 branding.
Nowadays, both culture and design tend to become convergence. It is undeniable that convergence is quite beneficial in the short term. For example, businesses can create products that same as most of the already popular products with minimal labor and time to get quick profits, but the long-term impact is also huge, like convergence design tends to stifle creativity. Designers need to understand and control more and more dimensions, design is becoming deeper and more complex. More generally, designers need to consider new, more creative strategies to capture the user's attention, and even go deeper into emotion and perception than only vision.
Culturally: How can systems thinking be foundational?
The job of designers is to inspire the world to tackle the problems that, on the surface, seem
intractable. If we’re only thinking about the short term, only thinking about shipping the next
product, and not asking questions about the future, we’re not inspiring the world and that’s an
important role. The problems are changing. The underlying technologies from which one can
build solutions are changing. Machine learning, data, AI, and blockchain are getting more and more important. For design to be relevant it has to be as close to the edge of where technology meets society as possible.
“Everything we design has to be a learning system; it can’t just be an artifact. So much
technology today makes it possible. Sensors, smart software–they learn about what’s
happening, they learn what people are doing, and what their effects on the system are. We can gather insights about what the designs can do, and they will become more and more powerful in turn. Designers also have to ensure that the learnings benefit everyone, not just the corporations who build the code. Designers have to remember to use that learning to make the designs better. That’s the exciting opportunity today. It used to be a ‘one and done’ mentality. If the product didn’t work, you had to accept that. Designers have a reputation of wanting to jump from one thing to another; it’s inspiring and entrepreneurial. But as designers we have to find ways to find satisfaction in sticking with these problems for longer.” – Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, designers of the Willow Smart Breast Pump
Economically: Can design interrupt the cycle of capitalism?
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to
come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian.
“Our current economic system is really at its edge. There are designers who don’t want to participate in it any more if they’re enforcing inequality and expanding on it. The design industry is part of the problem. There is an idea that we constantly have to produce new things. The industry is oriented around launches and designing a new one and another new one. A model of designing things to last is less lucrative, but we can imagine something that will work with the reality of the economy–something that will age well and you can love over time and is not the best on the first day out of the store. Shifting away from a ‘new’ mind-set to one of ‘necessity’ or ‘usefulness’ is hard because I think design–and I’m talking about furniture and product design and architecture–is mostly a luxury market. Our efforts as designers should be to create things that are meaningful for larger audiences rather than perks for a smaller audience. Design is commerce and industry, and it wants to make money. Designers will think, ‘Who am I designing for?’ It’s not just thinking about if you can realize a product and bring it to market; it’s also thinking about who will be using it in the end. There will be a younger generation of designers will become more conscious.” – Florian Idenburg, principal of SO-IL, architects of the Jan and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum
Politically: Is politics the next design frontier?
“It’s time to bring design thinking to politics instead of designing a snazzy product–taking
designers’ intellect and problem-solving abilities to geopolitical and societal issues rather than tamper-proof nappies. When we come into contact with politicians and try to discuss design and the creative arts, they only talk to us about exports. That gives us tremendous insight about their understanding of politics and society; it’s driven by economics rather than problemsolving.The onus is on us, as designers, to go to them. They don’t know we’re a resource to be tapped.”— Jay Osgerby, principal of Barber Osgerby, designers of the Pacific Chair.
The design based on politics is a kind of "empathy thinking", reminding us of the blind spots of subjective experience, so that everyone can make the most appropriate and effective communication from each other's perspective. , Especially the need to focus on this feature. After all, design "cannot be disconnected from the position or position that was originally
created." For designers, designing in a political context that can easily deviate may cause
some mistakes.
Environmentally: Why can ethics no longer be an afterthought?
“Adding intelligence to dumb things, or making smart things much smarter–will be a pervasive driver for innovation in the next decade and beyond. Designing smart systems behaviour is tricky enough, but the real challenge will be the ethical questions we would need to answer as we go along. For example, how do we know machine learning systems are not perpetuating inequalities that were inadvertently built into their training data? We would need to look really deeply into whose values these smart systems are promoting, and who wins and who loses when these values permeate our lives? This means that the discipline of design will be forced to think about the outcomes of our work in a much more long-term context–literally what future do we want to create and more importantly try to avoid.” – Rob Girling, cofounder and co-CEO of Artefact, designers of USAFacts and StoryboardVR
Ethics first is both scientific and necessary. The application of emerging technologies is highly oriented and complex. Many risks are not only scientific judgments, but also value judgments. Ethical design can promote more standardized development of science and technology and strengthen different levels of supervision mechanisms.
Resources
Books:
The Future of Design: Global Product Innovation for a Complex World,Lorraine Justice
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming,Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby
Article:
The ontological nature of design: Prospecting new futures through probabilistic knowledge
Prospective design: A future-led mixed-methodology to mitigate unintended consequences
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