Association of Professional Futurists posterous

The Association of Professional Futurists (APF) is pleased to invite you to its tenth twitter chat on Thursday, 21 July 2011 from 4:00 – 5:00 pm EDT/New York; 9:00-10:00 BST/London; Friday 22 July 6:00 - 7:00 am PST/Sydney. hashtag: #futrchat. Previous chats explored the future of education, money, work, transportation, big questions, disasters, relationships, power, and limited resources.

July topic: The future of design

by Cindy Frewen Wuellner, FAIA, PhD
Co-Chair APF

This month, futrchat is being geo-hosted at the offices of APF member Jim Cramer, CEO, of The Greenway Group/Design Futures Council. 

Does design change?
In my several (ahem) decades in design, sure, it’s changed, and it’s changing. We've seen aesthetic patterns, modern, post-modern, post-construction, post-what? Maybe integral, whatever design phase we are in now. Design traditionally is the art of objects, the virtuous element. Good design, bad design, it’s a bit in the eye of the beholder.

Yet designers can usually agree when something's worth our time, worth criticism, worth visiting and examining. We may not agree ultimately if it is good. That's where our preferences and ideologies crop up.

Frequently contemporary design is denied value. Particularly starting in the modern era and even more now, designers split with many other people's sense of beauty. The gap turned to a gaping chasm. People denigrated the Eiffel Tower, berated the World Trade Centers, hated Frank Lloyd Wrights buildings. Now they all are beloved, revered for their brilliance. Today's design hate is reserved for far more bizarre images, which I deeply appreciate for their courage. The design that turns my stomach are useless, wasteful designs.

Design that matters
What’s changed fundamentally are our expectations of design. It’s not good enough to simply function, to be beautiful. It has to mean something, to be relevant. Good design means it recognizes environmental concerns. It’s reflective of the region, responds to external conditions, and recognizes its neighbors. It doesn’t waste materials and it uses them thoughtfully.

We learn from nature rather than object to it by using Biomimicry. We strive to make things just right, more elegant, simpler, more fitting to an occasion, that employs “a deep knowledge of biological adaptations,” according to Janine Benyus.

We now want human-centered as opposed to machine-centered design. We care about people, not things. And I’ve got to say, that’s a leap.  

• Rather than the art of design, it’s the design experience.  

Instead, good design expands our quality of life. Call it the “ipod factor” or the “Apple factor.” Everyone has clued into the benefits of the well-made object. No longer settling for a clunky gadget, we look for the sleekest, thinnest, lightest weight items. Cool little fittings and magnet clasps that work beautifully.

Design thinking - objects and organizations
From design process (research, define the problem, create alternatives, select, develop, implement) as we use to say, Tim Brown made design thinking hip. As CEO of IDEO, a design and innovation company, he collected groups of brilliant designers and perceptive problem solvers to aggressively play, not just play around, but actually launch design ideas and make things, frequently prototypes. Design thinking had more phases and assumed you were making something to be replicated and improved: define, research, ideation, prototype, objectives, implement, learn. In other words, design as a learning process.

And that could apply to business! Suddenly creative design leaped from the back room of “designers” to a new tool for innovation. While art and design had been something that cost money, made things extraordinarily costly for no apparent reason, suddenly design became the poster child for profit. Creativity could win new business, attract new markets, and even improve lives. Win, win, triple win!  

Not just for objects, design thinking is applied to organizations, to manufacturing processes, to any creative endeavor that needs a new spin, revitalizing. Rather than concern for failure, we want to fail fast and fail often. We test ideas to make them fail so that we can try another idea. That’s the art of prototyping. Fail fail fail when you are doing just one or a few, then you find better ways and can make many. Rather than a linear lesson from point a to point b, you take the circuitous route, the lateral path to figure multiple alternatives (now that is the same as the design process.)

• Co-creation depends on new models based on networks, flows of ideas and resources, connections, places, and people. Furthermore, the process is emergent, generative, analytical, dynamic, and reflective.
  
• Co-creation blends human dimensions with technological innovation. Initially, you will play with virtual representations of cities in data-rich, learning, self-improving game-like virtual environments.
  
• Future co-making and co-constructing, as done in the past and in informal developments now, will be based on adaptive quality of life solutions and responsiveness to people’s needs and aspirations.

Design and futures thinking
Futures and design processes are being linked because both ask what if or what will be? And both go through similar steps from investigation to alternatives. Futures can learn from design’s creativity rigor and design can learn from futurists’ systems thinking w/ causal loops and consequences.

You could say the design steps are quite similar to futures thinking. In foresight projects, we research, assess, create, develop, implement. In design projects, we research, create, develop, build, occupy or use. There’s a pattern of understanding the context, then the specific needs, stretching out to alternatives, selecting, developing, making, and using. 

1.  In design, creativity is paramount. In object design, tectonics, the characteristics and strengths of materials act as constraints.
2. In futures work, imagination to envision unknown futures balances with broad research and analysis of trends, cycles, and so on. Rather than constraints, we pick variables and emergent properties.
3. Designers tend to get things done now, today or within the next few years, creating change. We have very definite control in the short-term, finite way (although no control of 2^nd order consequences, ripple effects).
4. Futurists tend to look much further out, defining the least to most unknown, speaking about “probables” but admit to very little control since change, we might say, is interactive and fragments over time.
5. Can we design the future? And would we want to? On the other hand, can we futurize our designs?
6. What will design mean in 2020, 2030, or 2050?