The Future of Design and Design Education

Bruce Sterling has defined design fiction as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” Speculative objects, then, help people understand the future consequences of present choices perhaps even more effectively than virtual images or written text, and consequently, enable them to engage with transformation over time.

After a prolonged adolescence where style perhaps outweighed substance, design thinking has grown up. Now is the time to combine design methods with systems thinking to enable the adaptive and innovative institutions we need for the future.

Lawson & Dorst, 2009 via Bas Leurs

You are especially welcome if you feel you are part of an underrepresented group in Design.

Designer Antoinette Carroll pinpoints one of the contributing factors of oppression: designing for exclusion. That is why she has made it her mission to think of her work as system building rather than object building. What if we could redesign for inclusion?

Is the promise of MOOCs really about reaching underserved learners or scaling universities’ business models? Are both possible? What role can designers play in crafting the learning experiences of the future?

Source: Illia Pashkov

Rune’s talk about his work and the book at London’s Processing Community Day, 2019

Thoughts on these questions come from Felix Janssens, creative director at Total Identity, Annelys de Vet, head of the design department at Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, Jan van Toorn, graphic designer and former head of the Jan van Eyck Academy, design historian Kirsten Algera, Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen, director of design agency LUST and Jasper Hauser, design manager at Facebook

With the decline in the study of history across the US (except at elite colleges), what does this mean for designers and design education? Is design history in decline too? The rise of bootcamps and other vocationally-focused programs in design often ignore history and critical inquiry behind the practice of design. How might we address this knowledge gap?