Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictabl... more Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictable creative practice regularly traverses, transcends and transfigures conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. As the fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative practice from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based,” we present the argument that the undisciplined and irresponsible researcher/practitioner, who purposely blurs distinctions and has exchanged “discipline-based” methods for “issue- or project-based” ones, will be best placed to make connections that generate new ways to identify “other” dimensions of design activity and thought that are needed for the complex, interdependent issues we now face. We present the case that reliance on the exhausted historic disciplines as the boundaries of our understanding has been superseded by a boundless space/time that we call “alterplinarity.” The digital has modified the models of design thought and action, and as a result research and practice should transform from a convention domesticated by the academy to a reaction to globalization that is undisciplined.
We, the authors, have been probing the state of the gesture of care for nearly a decade, and we s... more We, the authors, have been probing the state of the gesture of care for nearly a decade, and we staged our first international symposium to begin a process of re-formulating the conceptual basis of Care from the point of view of design in Copenhagen in 2015. A few years and events later the first "Does Design Care…?" workshop at Imagination Lancaster in 2017 asked participants to respond to what we had identified as 10 problems with care. Since then the concept of 'care' has become very popular with a booming literature very little of which sees any problems associated with care other than the need for more of it. In addition to the ten problems we started with the first workshop produced some problems with the problems. We wondered whether it was worth asking how much care, in particular health and social care, is just opportunistic. It is not enough for me to care – the other must need care. So people appearing to need care are perfect, soft targets for something that we design and call care, i.e. something easily imitating care. We also wonder what is the attraction for design to want to get into bed with health and social care when the invisible gesture of care is so complex - care is always care of the other, care for the other, care to be cared for by the other, care for what the other cares for. And when an emerging platform we could call design and care comes into existence why do all the anecdotes paraded as design solutions appear to validate the design actions, especially when anecdotes never have currency in the disciplines? We could see why it was attractive to equate care with historic misconceptions of utopia because mixing design with care reprises the unfictionable ideals of design. But why does design need the increasingly popular 'fictions' to approach care? Does that make care a fiction? The trickiest issue for us was the carefully circumvented question of how design can avoid getting entangled in care's transactional platform? Was care simply another opportunity for design in its pact with capital? With the maturing of the service economy eventually people just wanted to be served so with the rapid rise and maturing of the caring economy is it probable that people will just want to be cared for? If so, this is perfect for the business of care but what about the design of care? Keep in mind that service design is just transactional affairs sold under the guise of friendship (Rodgers & Bremner 2018). Also, can design distinguish between interactional care and transactional care? The former is a basic gesture most of us engage instinctively while the later is an uncharitable trick of the Capital project. It would appear that at first all the design proceedings pushing the issue of care are confronting basic questions such as what do we mean when we speak care, and what do we mean when we think care? But its now appearing to be easier for conferences and authors to sidestep these basic questions and leap straight to the managerial 'case-study' model. We were still interested in where we locate care (as gesture) or where we locate the idea of care (as value)? Does care initiate a process of production (e.g. via gestures)? Or do our habitual actions produce care (i.e. is care an end product or by-product?)? Perhaps the most troubling question for design is whether design is attempting to give care agency or turn care into an agent, and as such, the relational design/product/service par excellence? What made us even more suspicious was design's sudden predilection to chronicle its actions – its case studies and anecdotes - as acts of empathy, which prompted us to ask – what was design doing before it discovered empathy? But is design aware that empathy makes designers imagine they are people they are not (Solnit 2015) and that "empathy is, in a word, selfish…is biased…is short sighted" (Serpell 2019). Almost all of the above questions were answered in a matter of months – specifically the months from January 1st to May 31st 2020 – the period during which we scooped up design's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the projects accumulated we assembled them into a book that we published soon after. This chapter tells the story of this book – "A Design History of the COVID-19 Virus". We documented hundreds of projects many of which might have saved lives. All were produced as quickly as possible with designs getting more and more rudimentary – imperfection was irrelevant. Use was king. Life saving designs, absolutely essential and useful but all imperfect. Perfection would have been deathly! But long before we witnessed the absolute utility of imperfection Andrea Branzi wrote in his "Introduction to Italian Design" (2008) that imperfection had already superseded perfection as the archetype of design: "The activity of innovation, which today design is called to respond to, follows strategies completely different from those past, committed to realising definitive products, that is industrial…
Overview The Ecology of Care (EoC) as a field of research and practice originated in the Faculty ... more Overview The Ecology of Care (EoC) as a field of research and practice originated in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Southern Denmark. It was designed to research and promote the concept of Care (the prioritising of Human needs). Care is essentially about tackling societal challenges from a human and ecological point of view, something of a reversed perspective on the current paradigm driven by liberal Capital. We see this as an extraordinary opportunity for real and useful innovation on a global scale. An Ecology of Care examines the fundamental reasons why and how we do what we used to do naturally in an increasingly unnatural world. In this artificial condition the Ecology of Care provides many new opportunities before the future is foreclosed. We have structured the project An Ecology of Care as a lens through which to investigate the way in which Care occurs in relationship to everyone and everything (not just health care). We have taken this perspective on the ...
Architectural engineering encompasses urban planning and architectural design exercises that are ... more Architectural engineering encompasses urban planning and architectural design exercises that are part of professional development In contrast to the engineering discipline, the regularity of well- ...
By examining the contemporary situation of the Design School from a global perspective, this book... more By examining the contemporary situation of the Design School from a global perspective, this book explores how the structure of design learning and teaching, research and practice, is being transformed by a number of internal, external, and contextual factors and the implications of these factors for future iterations of the Design School. Exploring contemporary design education, this book asks whether Design Schools are shaping a new type of designer, or if tomorrow’s designers will emerge from other professions such as business, health care, education, and computing, where design ‘thinking’ is now regularly applied. The book is proposed at a time when governments and markets across the world are reshaping education. In a time of rapid and intensive change, it looks internationally at the shape of the Design School of the future. The book has been developed from a series of summits that explored the future of the contemporary Design School informed by international perspectives fro...
Usability refers to the functional relationships between people and the products and systems they... more Usability refers to the functional relationships between people and the products and systems they use. The concept is relatively straightforward: if something is able to fulfill its purported function (if it is "usable"), then it exhibits "usability"
Since the inception of the Bauhaus, two major contemporary socio-cultural and technological trans... more Since the inception of the Bauhaus, two major contemporary socio-cultural and technological transformations have forced schools of design to revise their curriculum. First, if we follow contemporary literature on what is called postmodernism, then the turn to the discourse of disciplinary autonomy and inter-disciplinarity can be associated with the student uprising of 1968; and the second transformation can be associated with the emergence of consumer culture and information and communication technologies. The socio-cultural transformation then had three consequences for the teaching of design. First, instead of the Bauhaus emphasis on ‘design’, ‘design studies’ sought the realisation of its potential in establishing a dialogue with methods and theories developed in scientific realms. Second, whereas a major objective of the Bauhaus was to replace the traditional notion of ‘creativity’ with that of ‘invention’, the latter’s scope was framed either by typological and morphological re...
INTRODUCTION Design, and more specifically design research, in taking what we call the ethnograph... more INTRODUCTION Design, and more specifically design research, in taking what we call the ethnographic turn, has adopted many research techniques from the allied disciplines of anthropology and sociology. In this chapter we present the case that this turn, while attractive to the discovery of the user and their experience, has occurred with little consideration for the fundamentally different enterprises that are ethnography and design. We look specifically at the use of photo-observation and note that its use is generally premised on the notion that the photograph is evidence. We argue that by viewing the photograph as ethnographic evidence we accept it on its own conditions and consequently it conditions us to see the world-as-is. However, design is concerned with what-mightbecome, and this conditioning is problematic for it results in the endless reproduction of the here-and-now. With specific reference to one of the author’s research projects we will demonstrate that if we regard t...
Contemporary design is typified by fluid, evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, ... more Contemporary design is typified by fluid, evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, transcend and transfigure historical disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. This mutability means that design research, education, and practice is constantly shifting, ...
Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictabl... more Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictable creative practice regularly traverses, transcends and transfigures conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. As the fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative practice from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based,” we present the argument that the undisciplined and irresponsible researcher/practitioner, who purposely blurs distinctions and has exchanged “discipline-based” methods for “issue- or project-based” ones, will be best placed to make connections that generate new ways to identify “other” dimensions of design activity and thought that are needed for the complex, interdependent issues we now face. We present the case that reliance on the exhausted historic disciplines as the boundaries of our understanding has been superseded by a boundless space/time that we call “alterplinarity.” The digital has modified the models of design thought and action, and as a result research and practice should transform from a convention domesticated by the academy to a reaction to globalization that is undisciplined.
We, the authors, have been probing the state of the gesture of care for nearly a decade, and we s... more We, the authors, have been probing the state of the gesture of care for nearly a decade, and we staged our first international symposium to begin a process of re-formulating the conceptual basis of Care from the point of view of design in Copenhagen in 2015. A few years and events later the first "Does Design Care…?" workshop at Imagination Lancaster in 2017 asked participants to respond to what we had identified as 10 problems with care. Since then the concept of 'care' has become very popular with a booming literature very little of which sees any problems associated with care other than the need for more of it. In addition to the ten problems we started with the first workshop produced some problems with the problems. We wondered whether it was worth asking how much care, in particular health and social care, is just opportunistic. It is not enough for me to care – the other must need care. So people appearing to need care are perfect, soft targets for something that we design and call care, i.e. something easily imitating care. We also wonder what is the attraction for design to want to get into bed with health and social care when the invisible gesture of care is so complex - care is always care of the other, care for the other, care to be cared for by the other, care for what the other cares for. And when an emerging platform we could call design and care comes into existence why do all the anecdotes paraded as design solutions appear to validate the design actions, especially when anecdotes never have currency in the disciplines? We could see why it was attractive to equate care with historic misconceptions of utopia because mixing design with care reprises the unfictionable ideals of design. But why does design need the increasingly popular 'fictions' to approach care? Does that make care a fiction? The trickiest issue for us was the carefully circumvented question of how design can avoid getting entangled in care's transactional platform? Was care simply another opportunity for design in its pact with capital? With the maturing of the service economy eventually people just wanted to be served so with the rapid rise and maturing of the caring economy is it probable that people will just want to be cared for? If so, this is perfect for the business of care but what about the design of care? Keep in mind that service design is just transactional affairs sold under the guise of friendship (Rodgers & Bremner 2018). Also, can design distinguish between interactional care and transactional care? The former is a basic gesture most of us engage instinctively while the later is an uncharitable trick of the Capital project. It would appear that at first all the design proceedings pushing the issue of care are confronting basic questions such as what do we mean when we speak care, and what do we mean when we think care? But its now appearing to be easier for conferences and authors to sidestep these basic questions and leap straight to the managerial 'case-study' model. We were still interested in where we locate care (as gesture) or where we locate the idea of care (as value)? Does care initiate a process of production (e.g. via gestures)? Or do our habitual actions produce care (i.e. is care an end product or by-product?)? Perhaps the most troubling question for design is whether design is attempting to give care agency or turn care into an agent, and as such, the relational design/product/service par excellence? What made us even more suspicious was design's sudden predilection to chronicle its actions – its case studies and anecdotes - as acts of empathy, which prompted us to ask – what was design doing before it discovered empathy? But is design aware that empathy makes designers imagine they are people they are not (Solnit 2015) and that "empathy is, in a word, selfish…is biased…is short sighted" (Serpell 2019). Almost all of the above questions were answered in a matter of months – specifically the months from January 1st to May 31st 2020 – the period during which we scooped up design's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the projects accumulated we assembled them into a book that we published soon after. This chapter tells the story of this book – "A Design History of the COVID-19 Virus". We documented hundreds of projects many of which might have saved lives. All were produced as quickly as possible with designs getting more and more rudimentary – imperfection was irrelevant. Use was king. Life saving designs, absolutely essential and useful but all imperfect. Perfection would have been deathly! But long before we witnessed the absolute utility of imperfection Andrea Branzi wrote in his "Introduction to Italian Design" (2008) that imperfection had already superseded perfection as the archetype of design: "The activity of innovation, which today design is called to respond to, follows strategies completely different from those past, committed to realising definitive products, that is industrial…
Overview The Ecology of Care (EoC) as a field of research and practice originated in the Faculty ... more Overview The Ecology of Care (EoC) as a field of research and practice originated in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Southern Denmark. It was designed to research and promote the concept of Care (the prioritising of Human needs). Care is essentially about tackling societal challenges from a human and ecological point of view, something of a reversed perspective on the current paradigm driven by liberal Capital. We see this as an extraordinary opportunity for real and useful innovation on a global scale. An Ecology of Care examines the fundamental reasons why and how we do what we used to do naturally in an increasingly unnatural world. In this artificial condition the Ecology of Care provides many new opportunities before the future is foreclosed. We have structured the project An Ecology of Care as a lens through which to investigate the way in which Care occurs in relationship to everyone and everything (not just health care). We have taken this perspective on the ...
Architectural engineering encompasses urban planning and architectural design exercises that are ... more Architectural engineering encompasses urban planning and architectural design exercises that are part of professional development In contrast to the engineering discipline, the regularity of well- ...
By examining the contemporary situation of the Design School from a global perspective, this book... more By examining the contemporary situation of the Design School from a global perspective, this book explores how the structure of design learning and teaching, research and practice, is being transformed by a number of internal, external, and contextual factors and the implications of these factors for future iterations of the Design School. Exploring contemporary design education, this book asks whether Design Schools are shaping a new type of designer, or if tomorrow’s designers will emerge from other professions such as business, health care, education, and computing, where design ‘thinking’ is now regularly applied. The book is proposed at a time when governments and markets across the world are reshaping education. In a time of rapid and intensive change, it looks internationally at the shape of the Design School of the future. The book has been developed from a series of summits that explored the future of the contemporary Design School informed by international perspectives fro...
Usability refers to the functional relationships between people and the products and systems they... more Usability refers to the functional relationships between people and the products and systems they use. The concept is relatively straightforward: if something is able to fulfill its purported function (if it is "usable"), then it exhibits "usability"
Since the inception of the Bauhaus, two major contemporary socio-cultural and technological trans... more Since the inception of the Bauhaus, two major contemporary socio-cultural and technological transformations have forced schools of design to revise their curriculum. First, if we follow contemporary literature on what is called postmodernism, then the turn to the discourse of disciplinary autonomy and inter-disciplinarity can be associated with the student uprising of 1968; and the second transformation can be associated with the emergence of consumer culture and information and communication technologies. The socio-cultural transformation then had three consequences for the teaching of design. First, instead of the Bauhaus emphasis on ‘design’, ‘design studies’ sought the realisation of its potential in establishing a dialogue with methods and theories developed in scientific realms. Second, whereas a major objective of the Bauhaus was to replace the traditional notion of ‘creativity’ with that of ‘invention’, the latter’s scope was framed either by typological and morphological re...
INTRODUCTION Design, and more specifically design research, in taking what we call the ethnograph... more INTRODUCTION Design, and more specifically design research, in taking what we call the ethnographic turn, has adopted many research techniques from the allied disciplines of anthropology and sociology. In this chapter we present the case that this turn, while attractive to the discovery of the user and their experience, has occurred with little consideration for the fundamentally different enterprises that are ethnography and design. We look specifically at the use of photo-observation and note that its use is generally premised on the notion that the photograph is evidence. We argue that by viewing the photograph as ethnographic evidence we accept it on its own conditions and consequently it conditions us to see the world-as-is. However, design is concerned with what-mightbecome, and this conditioning is problematic for it results in the endless reproduction of the here-and-now. With specific reference to one of the author’s research projects we will demonstrate that if we regard t...
Contemporary design is typified by fluid, evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, ... more Contemporary design is typified by fluid, evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, transcend and transfigure historical disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. This mutability means that design research, education, and practice is constantly shifting, ...
Does Design Care...? includes over 25 working papers from researchers based all over the world. D... more Does Design Care...? includes over 25 working papers from researchers based all over the world. During the 2-day design thought and action workshop in Imagination, Lancaster University, UK, we welcomed researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines to to explore what it means to care now. The Does Design Care...? working papers includes researchers from an international community with some attendees travelling from as far as the USA, New Zealand, Australia, China, Israel and Japan. The working papers explore different ways to conceptualise, provoke, contest and disrupt care, and serve as a collection of work for synthesising future visions of care. Does Design Care...? compiles papers from all of the workshop participants.
Architectural engineering encompasses urban planning and architectural design exercises that are ... more Architectural engineering encompasses urban planning and architectural design exercises that are part of professional development. In contrast to the engineering discipline, the regularity of well-defined familiar tasks does not predominate in a design studio. However, to be able to work along with a larger pool of professionals and increase the potential for creative problem solving it is imperative to provide an engineering education that challenges the conventions of its framework. Consequently, students encountering design problems without prior experience need to assume responsibility for their interpretation of the problems in which they are being challenged. The aim of this pilot study was to survey, describe and analyze the problem-solving approach among undergraduate students in relation to their control strategies and successive learning. The study was completed in Jönköping, Sweden. In an online survey (N=32) using a convenient sampling, students' locus of control (LOC) were measured in three school years in the undergraduate program to assess the perceived control over their learning situation. Additionally, three focus group interviews were performed to shed light on how individual learning modes manifested on a different LOC level and in respective school years. Descriptive statistics showed a trend that students' LOC is moving from external to be more internal by the advancement in their studies. Accordingly, they would over time develop a preference for group design exercises that are more problem-oriented, rather than project-based, thus matching a more internal LOC. Although the trend was clear, statistically significant differences were not found between the measured variables (LOC, gender, age, school year, subject major), possibly due to the low sample size. The focus group interviews supported the trend, where students' initial frustration over unclear instructions and dependence on external control gradually shifts toward a more reflective attitude and a greater feeling of internal control, individual competence and professional development.
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Papers by Craig Bremner