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The Many Faces of Design
Get PDFIn light of contemporary global pressures, designers have been considering how to apply their thinking and practice more broadly within the enterprise of sustainability. Given the often wicked nature and cross-scale dynamics of related challenges, there is reason to reassess the role of design in processes of systems transformation amidst complexity. In this manuscript, the author contemplates the diversity of ‘designerly ways’, in interpretation of designers’ encounters with complex adaptive systems. These interactions are classified here using the three lenses of adaptive response, creative agency and emergent engagement.In light of contemporary global pressures, designers have been considering how to apply their thinking and practice more broadly within the enterprise of sustainability. Given the often wicked nature and cross-scale dynamics of related challenges, there is reason to reassess the role of design in processes of systems transformation amidst complexity. In this manuscript, the author contemplates the diversity of ‘designerly ways’, in interpretation of designers’ encounters with complex adaptive systems. These interactions are classified here using the three lenses of adaptive response, creative agency and emergent engagement
The many faces of design: From adaptive response to creative agency to reflective engagement
Get PDFDesign is pervasive – both as act and outcome. For this reason, the term itself moves casually across domains, rendering the boundaries of a specific design discipline evasive; especially recently, where those in the field are deliberately extending their expertise into territory beyond that which might be considered a classic design problem space. Against the recent backdrop of surmounting complexity and related social-ecological pressures that arise with population growth and ongoing social-technological development, not only have designers been stirred to reform their own work to address these dynamics, additionally, they are reflecting on the role of design and design thinking in navigating the wicked problems indicative of the contemporary global milieu (Kolko, 2012; Mau, Leonard, J., & the Institute without Boundaries, 2004). In doing so, they are renewing design practice as an increasingly social and strategic process, bidding to occupy the realm of social innovation and large-scale systems transformation.
However, social innovation literature indicates that profound social change amidst complexity is not a one-stop operation, neither is it direct, nor prone to absolute control. Rather, it requires alignment across multiple domains, and the order in which this takes place will depend on the point from which one begins, as well as the nature of the barriers and opportunities at hand. As such, a layered, adaptive approach is vital when navigating the dynamics of complex, non-linear systems. Interpreting design through its ‘many faces’ — that is, the many definitions that it encompasses, the ways of thinking and acting that it engenders, the types of outcomes in which it results, and the functions that it serves — is conducive to the development of this kind of flexible and phased approach. Drawing on discourses of resilience, systems, and complexity thinking, this paper embeds an analysis of ‘the many faces of design’ within a social innovation framework, by which to assess them as a series of mechanisms for long-term, adaptive systems transformation. In this regard, designers have begun to consciously codify and extend what are common sense approaches to problem solving and innovation within the umbrella of ‘design thinking’ (Berger, 2009). Moreover, design practitioners acknowledge how their specific choices can have resonant impact at a global scale (Papanek, 1971), yet these cascading effects cannot always be predicted nor specified (Folke, 2006). The paper examines the many roles that design assumes — as an adaptive process of sensemaking (Alexander, 1964; Kolko, 2011), as a symbolic mediator (Verbeek, 1970), and as an integrated system — while considering how impetus for the design process fluctuates, from an intuitive response (Alexander, 1964), to an act of creative agency (Mau et al., 2004), to an approach to problem solving required to reflectively synchronize with dynamic, emergent conditions (Brown, 2012)
Resetting Growth Curves
Get PDFExplores the key notions around Planetary Boundaries and Planetary Health in the context of enabling Resilience and Sustainable Development. Key areas of investigation include Concepts (balancing among planetary, socio-ecological systems dynamics), Methodologies (evolving regenerative science, innovation and governance), Analysis (profiling emergent patterns), and Applications (reorganizing multiscale systems)
The Dual Nature of Sustainability
No full textSustainability as a problem domain is not only complex, rather could be characterised through numerous dualities, which are notably difficult to reconcile. For example, some of these include (a) managing short-term targets for sustainable development and climate action, along with long-term visions by which to repattern broader human ecologies; (b) protecting ecosystems against human intervention, while attempting to establish reconnection between nature and culture; (c) maintaining one’s socioeconomic status, while facilitating
fundamental institutional reform; and, (d) enabling quality of life for diverse populations, while minimising the ecological footprint of industrialised development. Arguably, these dualities also imply a need for more than one phase of transition—a fast and slow, or short and long, track for systems change
The Age of Planetary Systems Complexity
Get PDFIn this workshop, we will discuss the key intellectual, social, and political trends that have been unfolding over the past sixty years, which are reflective of a regenerative paradigm. Generally speaking, these shifts represent an interest in cultivating well-being for people and planet, combined with an awareness of the cross-scale complexities that can arise across globalized systems. They might be summarized as follows:
(a) the designation of a unique set of eras;
(b) rising concern over environmental degradation, natural resource consumption, extreme poverty, and social inequality;
(c) counterplay between utopic and dystopic, optimistic and pessimistic narratives;
(d) critique and amendment of conventional methodologies in research, innovation, and governance, amidst uncertainty and high-stake problem scenarios;
(e) extension of power, agency, and governance as lenses of critical analyses;
(f) hyper restructuring of modern modes of thought, organization, production, and development;
(g) vacillation between micro- and macro-level frameworks in problem analyses and management;
(h) extrapolation of ecological into complex systems and relational worldviews; and,
(i) reinvention of the sacred.
Workshop participants will map these intersecting areas of thought and action, identifying the conceptual and methodological advancements implied, therein. The workshop will close with groups pitching ideas for related applications in social, service, institutional, product, industrial, architectural, landscape, and urban-based systemic design
Navigating narratives of crisis and hope
No full textBetween utopian visions of Earthly paradises and dystopian views of authoritarian post-apocalypses, cultural narratives of the future can oftentimes leave us torn between hoping for the best and fearing the worst. Meanwhile, recent global events have been evocative of our worst nightmares: a widespread pandemic; climate disaster; the uncovering of unmarked graves of Indigenous children; as well as, conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The magnitude of these situations has necessitated rapid response across institutions, at all levels; so too is it important to account for the localised, human dimensions of adapting and rebuilding amidst times of unexpected change. Through a reflective group process, in this workshop, we will dive into the social complexities of some of the most controversial scenarios with which we have been contending, as a global community, acknowledging the range of experiences and impacts that can arise across diverse populations
Return to the (managed) wild: Interpreting human settlements as “designer ecosystems”
Get PDFHuman civilizations stand out, recently, among other biotic communities for their instigation of global systems transformations that have been rapid, extensive, and enduring (Steffen, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2007). By virtue of cumulative, collaborative efforts, facilitated through the symbolic codification of knowledge, and stacked across generations and continents, the complexity of human cultures only continues to intensify (Christian, 2004): “Cultural change operates by mechanisms that can validate a general and driven trend to technological progress — so very different from the minor and passive trend that Darwinian processes permit in the realm of natural evolution” (Gould, 1996, p.223). By this means, the species has become a globally dominant presence, the impact of its activities echoed across terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric systems (Steffen et al., 2007; Hobbs, Higgs, & Hall, 2013).
Human settlements might be described as a magnet for, container to, and emblematic expression of human cultural systems. They are socially constructed systems that interface between the human species and the biosphere, directly coordinating and mediating the debated nature-culture relationship. If one embraces Lovelock’s (1979) Gaia hypothesis, whereby the planet is considered to be an interdependent, self-regulating unit, or, McDonough and Braungart’s (2013) upcycle approach, whereby human creative pursuits feed reciprocally into biosphere cycles, then perhaps one can find a place for this domesticated species within the ‘natural order’ of things: “Our human role is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves” (Swimme & Tucker, 2011, p.116). Deeply embedding human activities within the cycles of inhabited ecosystems, calls for designers and ecologists, together, to consider the notion of hybridization: “… ‘urbanization is not merely a … distancing of human life from nature, but rather a process by which new and more complex relationships are created’. The challenge of social-ecological integration, however, is one that requires closer articulation, both philosophically and schematically. For example, it is unclear what an application of philosophies such as Leopold’s (1949) land ethic or Rifkin’s (2009) biosphere consciousness should mean, on practical terms, for highly engineered, urban systems. Simply accepting human activity and its resulting technologies as an extension of nature risks dismissing environmental accountability (White, 2003). No doubt, achieving a state of complete integration with ecosystem processes would entail nothing short of a long-term unwinding of rigid infrastructural and social regimes, through a phased, scaled, and community engaged process of renewal. Thus, the arguments for pursuing this direction as part of a long-range sustainability strategy, and the means by which it might be possible to do so within the current social-technological landscape, are worth examination
Form follows meaning, meaning follows form: Surrendering the innocence of design
Get PDFCreativity is a loaded concept, which we seem to assign unconditional merit. The danger in this
arises when the allure and momentum of creative processes obscure underlying project agendas. If
we consider designed images, products, and environments to be part of the broader cultural setting,
then designers are accountable for the paradigms that we enable through our work. As systems-
oriented designers, we cannot hide behind the agendas of our clients; rather, we must view each
project as a powerful act of cultural meaning making, in which we share creative agency. In this
paper, we will briefly examine how changes taking place within the field of design may ultimately
influence what we construct as our experienced realities, and also how the positioning of creative
practices within a socio-economic system can determine how they are employed in cultural
production
The Many Faces of Design
Get PDFIn light of contemporary global pressures, designers have been considering how to apply their thinking and practice more broadly within the enterprise of sustainability. Given the often wicked nature and cross-scale dynamics of related challenges, there is reason to reassess the role of design in processes of systems transformation amidst complexity. In this manuscript, the author contemplates the diversity of ‘designerly ways’, in interpretation of designers’ encounters with complex adaptive systems. These interactions are classified here using the three lenses of adaptive response, creative agency and emergent engagement
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