The future of design

When asked about the future of design, I immediately think of two things. Firstly, I am drawn to the concept of design thinking - the process individuals go through when critically evaluating a situation, place, space or circumstance and reframing it. Design thinking is the critical reframing process. Secondly, my thoughts turn to education and the teaching of design thinking and the late philosopher John Dewey (1910:139), who states...

Challenges in passenger terminal design : a conceptual model of passenger experience

In recent years, de-regulation in the airline industry and the introduction of low-cost carriers have conspired to produce significant changes in the airport landscape. From an airport operator’s perspective, one of the most notable has been the shift of capital revenue from traditional airline sources (through exclusive use, long term lease arrangements) to passengers (by way of fees collected from ticket sales). As a result of these developments, passengers have become recognized as major stakeholders who have the power to influence airport profitability. This link between passenger satisfaction and profitability has generated industry wide interest in the “passenger experience”. In this paper, we define the factors which influence passenger experience, namely (a) artifacts, (b) services and (c) the terminal building, and explore the challenges that exist in the current approaches to terminal design. On the basis of these insights, we propose a conceptual model of passenger experience, and motivate its use as a framework for further research into improving terminal design from a passenger oriented perspective.

I just want to design a sexy flying car! Teaching design-led innovation to designers

Many international management programs have capitalised on the value design can have upon potential business solutions and strategies (Martin, 2009 & Brown, 2008) as well as many international design programs introducing designers to business theory and curriculum (Manzini & Rizzo, 2011). This paper presents the findings from structured interviews with undergraduate design students and design industry professionals. Current literature surrounding design led innovation and the role designers’ play within it is also discussed and the challenges facing designers in this emerging design era are presented. The findings from this study indicate that most designers enter an undergraduate program not wanting to become the business leaders of tomorrow. Instead, they enter in the hope they can humbly help people and to make a difference in the world. There are contentions with this perspective, felt by industry, academia and students around why designers need to be taught business theory content. This paper provides the first step to overcoming this challenge by providing insight into the attitudes, perceptions and challenges designers are facing with this new design era.

Engaging complexity through collaborative brand design

In this research we used inductive reasoning through design to understand how stakeholders in the Waterfall Way (New South Wales, Australia) perceive the relationships between themselves and the place they live in. This paper describes a collaborative design methodology used to release information about local identities, which guided the regional brand exercise. The methodology is explicit about the uncertainties and complexities of the design process and of its reception system. As such, it aims to engage with local stakeholders and experts in order to help elicit tacit knowledge and identify system patterns and trends that would possibly not be visible if a top-down expert-based process was used. Through collective design, local people were drawn together in search for a symbol to represent the meaning attached to their places/region in relation to sustainable tourism activity.

Teaching new product development to design led innovation

Recently many international tertiary educational programs have capitalised on the value design and business can have upon their interception (Martin, 2009; Brown, 2008; Bruce and Bessant, 2002; Manzini, 2009). This paper discusses the role that two teaching units – New Product Development and Design Led Innovation – play in forming an understanding of commercialisation needed in today’s Industrial Design education. These units are taught consecutively in the later years of the Bachelor of Industrial Design program at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. In this paper, each teaching unit is discussed in detail and then as a conglomerate, in order to form a basis of knowledge students need in order to fully capitalise on the value design has in business, and to produce a more capable Industrial Design graduate of the future.

Collaborative design learning for traditional crafts industry

Traditional craft industries need assistance with being transformed into creative industries; as such a transformation will support them to face the future competitive global market. Assistance such as advisory programs should serve long-term benefit for crafts industries as well as optimize self-help potential. Advisory programs using participatory methods will enable craftspeople and stakeholders to reveal resources and potencies, such as socio-cultural value, tradition and other kind of heritages, to generate new innovative ideas of craft design in a sustainable way.

From concept to capability : developing design thinking within a professional services firm

Corporate business and management are embracing design thinking for its potential to deliver competitive advantage through helping them be more innovative, differentiate their brands, and bring more customer centric products and services to market (Brown, 2008). As consumers continue to expect more personalisation and customisation from their service providers, the use of design thinking for innovation within organisations is a logical progression. To date however, there is little empirical literature discussing how organisations are setting about integrating design thinking into their culture and innovation practices. This paper is a first step in initiating a scholarly discussion on the integration of design thinking within organisational culture. Deloitte Australia is a large professional services firm employing over 5700 staff in 12 offices across Australia. The company provides a range of services to clients in the areas of audit, tax, financial advisory and consulting. In early 2011 the company made a strategic commitment to introducing design thinking into the organisation’s practices. While it already maintains a strong innovation culture, to date it had largely been operating within an analytical business environment. For Deloitte, design thinking is an opportunity to create better outcomes for the people they serve – both internal and external stakeholders (Brown and Wyatt, 2010). Research was conducted using case study methodology and ethnographic methods from June to September 2011 at the Melbourne Deloitte office. It involved three methods of data collection: semi structured interviews, participant observation and artifact analysis. This paper presents preliminary case study findings of Deloitte’s approach to building awareness and a consistent understanding of design thinking, as well as large scale capability, across the firm. Deloitte’s commitment to transforming its culture to one of design thinking poses significant potential for understanding how design thinking is comprehended, enabled and integrated within a complex organisational environment.

A new approach to understanding readings for design students

In this paper I describe an innovative technique for helping design students to approach and understand reading tasks. There is ample literature on design students’ use of visual thinking for design tasks, but less on how they can use their visual skills to apply to their learning in other areas, particularly those that challenge them such as academic reading and writing. I set a cartooning task as a way to get students motivated and involved in doing set readings for a design history course. This has been successful in enhancing students’ involvement and understanding, and they have been able to apply their improved understanding to writing tasks based on the cartoons.

Collaborative practices that support creativity in design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and; 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study.

Space as a resource in creative design practices

Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in two industrial design departments and two design companies, we explore the role of spatial arrangements for supporting creative design practices within different design studios. From our results, we show that designers explicitly make use of the physical space for: 1) communicating and inspiring design ideas; 2) exploring design solutions, and; 3) managing design projects. We believe that these design practices could bring insightful implications for developing ubiquitous technologies to support the design profession.

Experiential role of artefacts in cooperative design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an 'experiential' role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the materiality, use and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people's performance and help them make better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain such as industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by design-related artefacts such as sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes -- used and developed in designers' everyday work. Our main intention in carrying out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers' everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on the personal, social and creative side of people's everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a much broader view in the design of new interactive technologies.

Design Pressure Test 2013 Workshop

Design Pressure Test 2013 was a full-day intensive design immersion creative event run on Saturday 3 August 2013, at the QUT Faculty of Creative Industries J Block Design Lab Workshop in Brisbane, Australia, for 25 self-selected high-achieving junior and middle school (year 5-9) students, as part of the Queensland Academies ‘Young Scholars’ Program. Facilitated by tertiary interior design, fashion design and industrial design educators, technicians and six tertiary interior design and fashion design students, the workshop explored design process, environmental impact, the material properties and structural integrity of cardboard, construction techniques, and the production and evaluation of furniture design prototypes. This action research study aimed to facilitate an awareness in young people, of the role and scope of design within our society, the environmental ramifications of design decisions, and the value of design thinking skills in generating strategies to solve basic to complex challenges. It also aimed to investigate the value of collaboration between junior and middle school students, tertiary design educators and students and industry professionals in design awareness, and inspiring post-secondary pathways and idea generation for education. During the creative event, students utilised mathematics skills and developed sketching, making, communication, presentation and collaboration skills to improve their design process, while considering social, cultural and environmental opportunities. Through a series of hands-on collaborative design experiments, participants explored in teams of five, the opportunities available using cardboard as a material – inspiring both functional and aesthetic design solutions. Underpinned by the State Library of Queensland Design Minds Website ‘inquire, ideate and implement’ model of design thinking, the experiments culminated in the development of a detailed client brief, the design and fabrication of a furniture item for seating, and then a team presentation of prototypes to a panel of judges from the professions of architecture, interior design and industrial design, viewed also by parents. The final test for structural integrity was measured by the hoisting down of an adult body weight onto the fabricated seat. The workshop was filmed for the television program ‘Totally Wild’ for dissemination nationally (over 200,000 viewing audience) of the value of design and the Design Minds model to a wider target youth audience.

Provotypes: Teasing out tensions between industrial context and use context

What industrial organisations think people do and what they actually do are often two very different things. But exactly this tension can be a source of innovation: how can we give form to insights about what people do, to deliberately challenge industries' conceptions, and inspire new product and service development

A design approach to the study of people's experiences with technologies in the context of public transport

Relevant to the study of people’s attitudes towards public transport use is the consideration to the role of technology as part of the travel experience. Technologies aim to enhance daily tasks but tend to change the way people interact with products and can be perceived as difficult to use. This is critical in the context of “public use” where products and services are to be used by the population at large: adults, children, elderly, people with disabilities, and tourists. From different perspectives, the topic of users and the use of technologies have been studied in the social sciences and human computer interaction fields; however, earlier approaches fail to address the ways in which experiential knowledge informs people’s interactions with products and technologies, and how such information could guide the design of future technologies. This paper describes a pilot study, part of a larger ongoing exploratory research that investigates people’s experiences with infrastructure, systems, and technologies in the context of public transport. The methodological approach included focus groups, field observations, and retrospective verbal reports. At this stage, the study found that four context led factors were the primary source of reference informing participants’ actions and interactions; they are: (i) context >> experience, (ii) context >> interface, (iii) context >> knowledge, (iv) context >> emotion.