Contribution to Developing the Design Led Futures Programme

Proceedings of the …, 2009

While there have been improvements in Australian engineering education since the 1990s, there are still strong concerns that more progress needs to be made, particularly in the areas of developing graduate competencies and in outcomes-based curricula. This paper reports on the findings from a two-day ALTC-funded forum that sought to establish a shared understanding with the 3 stakeholders (students, academics and industry) about how to achieve a design-based engineering curriculum. This paper reports on the findings from the first day's activities and reveals that there is a shared desire for design and project-based curricula that would encourage the development of the 'three-dimensional' graduate: one who has technical, personal and professional and systems-thinking/design-based competence.

2015

Government increasingly recognises design thinking as "a ubiquitous capability for innovation" (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013:90) to support a viable manufacturing sector in the Asian century, this represents an opportunity for Design and Technology teachers to provide leadership in the cultivation of these generic skills, behaviours and mindsets through secondary school education in Australia.

Designers should keep up with the pace of change and have the power of directing change to the desirable. In order to design forward product/services in a continuously changing world, designers should have " future vision ". Futures Studies is considered a practical way to help designers develop the capacity for future vision. The main research problems in this study are; what kind of problems do students confront when they undertake future oriented design projects? and how can the implementation of futures research methods in studio education be beneficial for design students?

The Design Journal, 2017

Design and designers must be aware of their agency in designing for next. Whether creating the next contexts or the artefacts in them, design helps people make sense of and shape multiple alternative futures. Design therefore has a responsibility to unknown futures, and to design futures-focused products and services in a continuously changing world, designers need some understanding of strategic foresight and/or a capacity for anticipatory thinking. Strategic foresight offers a tangible knowledge base that can build this understanding or capacity in designers and design practice. The focus of this paper is on introducing anticipatory thinking and foresight tools and methods into design (through professional practice and education) to explore what designers might experience and create for design projects that are specifically futures-oriented; and to analyse how futures tools and methods might benefit practitioners and students. Building futures-oriented and anticipatory capacity into design practice as well as in learning experiences may better align both the design process and its outcomes with the values, needs and aspirations of prospective thinking and action, and bring about greater global wellbeing. This conceptual paper draws on anticipation theory and futures studies, transition design and design fiction, to propose that anticipation could inform design and innovation processes, increase designer agency, and support goals such as sustainability and longevity to enable the design of products and services in a system that can deliver sustained value over time.

2011

The global impact of ever-increasing mass consumerism set against the reality of finite resources, posits design with the responsibility as well as the ability to influence consumerism at every level, however to do this demands changing the way designers think, which in turn means re-educating, re-directing design and moving to Design Futures. The following quote is taken from a 2010 briefing paper by Professor Tony Fry: "Rather than looking at design education from the perspective of the design industry, or towards it, the Design Futures frame of reference is wider. It looks at it refracted through university education in general, beyond the industry and out into the future. This point of view does not ignore practicalities but rejects the notion that design education is purely vocational and pragmatic. Rather it asserts that first and foremost it has to be an education. Design Futures is firmly committed to the creation of educated designers. What this means is an education whereby the designer understands the world in which they are going to practice -socially, culturally, economically, politically, environmentally. It is predicated on the assumption that they have to know what they are doing, why and with what consequence. More than this, designers have to understand what design is and does in a wider worldly sense, have a basic understanding of its history beyond the narrow characterisations delivered by design history. Above all, graduate designers must realise design's implication in forming futures, and their own responsibility in this context. Students still have to acquire a wide range of technical skills BUT they have to know how to direct them and to what ends. Every educated designer needs to be equipped with a strategic sensibility, so they can steer their career path in ethically and economically viable directions. For this to be possible students need to be adequately educated so that their economic and employment opportunities will expand not contract! A design education has to be understood as expanding horizons and qualifying young people for more than just a conventional design job." The paper will discuss the process of developing an existing 3 Year Bachelor of Design degree based upon the service industry model of the past into a new 4 Year Bachelor of Design degree with embedded honours and the underlying Design Futures philosophy as the foundation of this new degree.

alexmilton.co.uk

The tasks designers will face in the near-to-medium term future will undoubtedly be ever more demanding and complex. The convergence of computing and communications technologies will enable designers to collaborate and share tasks in design and development without ever having to meet physically. Moreover, recent social, cultural and economic shifts throughout the world will demand designers to be ever more flexible in the work that they are asked to undertake. Future designers will, thus, need to be sensitive to the demands from many specific sectors of the global marketplace, be able to exploit fully developing technologies as they evolve, yet be increasingly speculative in synthesising their solutions whilst challenging conventional wisdom. This paper describes a new Interdisciplinary Design programme that aims to provide students with the necessary skills to achieve success in the design world of the future.

2012

Within the design industry there has been much promotion of how designers can engage with future oriented projects yet, there has been little investigation within academic design research of the methods employed. In some ways much of the discourse coming out of design practice is commercial propaganda - with the sole aim of generating new business. The design industry is good at communicating what future focussed services it is able to offer yet the methods employed are shrouded in a similar level of mystery (and scepticism) as those employed by a magician or shaman. Commercial sensitivities mean that the design industry is good as say what they can do in terms of creating future oriented ‘next-next generation’ products and services yet they do not convey how this is achieved with the same level of enthusiasm. A design led futures framework is presented to support designers in the development of next-next generation products (and services) and provides a mechanism to underpin future...

2012

The 18th academic conference hosted by the Design Management Institute (DMI) of Boston, Mass., attracted a greater number of papers than any previous conference. The event was intended to highlight the importance of the contribution of design to organisational effectiveness and success, particularly in the ways that it can improve the new product development process, contribute to better strategic thinking and decision-making, and be an important element in the leader¡¦s toolkit. The conference was a means for researchers and thinkers to celebrate the importance of design and to work towards becoming a credible and full participant in the work of organisations. We were proud and deeply honoured to have Professor Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, as our keynote speaker. He has been an inspirational thinker and one of the foremost and most passionate advocates of the methodologies and thinking of design as important and under-utilised organisational resources. Our goal was to create an inclusive conversation among academics from a variety of disciplines, including business (organizational behavior, strategy, marketing, and operations) and design management (design strategy, product design, brand identity, communications, interactive design, user experience, architecture, and environmental design). We aimed to advance the state of the art in design management research, theory, and practice, and produce a significant contribution to this exciting and fast-developing field. Businesses are changing; manufacturers are becoming service providers and services are focusing increasingly on experiences. Organizations, in both the profit and the social sector, are seeking competitive advantage through innovation in their offerings, structure, processes, and business models. We believe that this was an appropriate time to convene a gathering of academics to take a critical look at how to bring a scholarly lens to the ways that design may help to both shape and implement innovation in these emerging developments. The theme of the conference, Leading Innovation through Design, clearly attracted management theorists as well as well as design theorists, as it was intended to do. The conference organisers, in locating it close both physically and in terms of time alongside the management community's main academic conference -the AOM- hoped to attract "mainstream" management researchers to contribute to the design management research conversation. The organisers believe that design management research has been undeservedly neglected by management theorists. The result was a large number of submissions of top quality, interesting, and rigorous papers. A total of 195 submissions were received from 36 countries and 133 universities and research institutes. These submissions were blind reviewed. Approximately 45% were accepted for presentation of full papers at the conference, and are published in these proceedings. The conference was organised around these seven themes, and both full paper presentations and poster sessions were organised into these tracks: - Innovations in Design Research Methodologies, Management Processes - Bridging Research and Practice in the Management of Design - Design-Led Innovation in Business Models - Developing Design Thinking Skills - Design-Led Innovation in Products and Services - Design-Led Innovation in Organizations and the Workplace - Innovations in Design Management Education We would like to thank a number of people and organisations who have been helpful in organising the conference and preparing this set of proceedings. These include John Tobin, VP, Business Operations, from Design Management Institute who provided exceptional support in his role as Conference Secretary. We would like to thank Esther Dudley from Plymouth University, who encourage her students to produce artwork proposals for the conference identity, Sarah Essex whose design proposals were adopted, and every member of the International Scientific Review Committee who provided their time and expertise during the review process. This was a truly international team effort by conference committee whose members were dispersed across the world.

Proceedings of EDPE 08, …, 2008

Collaborative workshops are a very useful tool both for enterprises and design schools. For enterprises they are a great way to get fresh insights of new trends and new visions not polluted with the biased viewpoints of the company culture. These insights and trends are then interpreted internally through concept creation sessions in order to translate the relevant information into actionable knowledge for the company. For design schools it means the chance to offer to their students better experiences and a better studies' programs. Thus, according to the enterprises participating in these collaborative workshops the school becomes a more attractive option for future students. Moreover, for the students it represents the chance to work in a real environment, with real needs and real methodologies used in the design development process by successful companies. Through the paper, benefits and results of collaborative workshops carried out between Hewlett Packard EMEA Design Centre and Elisava School of Design are discussed. Moreover, processes that have been used as well as the methodology are deeply analyzed. Through an extensive explanation of the different phases of the collaborative workshop the importance of the balance between the participation of experts from the company and the guidance provided by design professors from the school is recognised. The study leads to consideration of the collaborative workshops between enterprises and design schools as a valid tool for prospective design development.