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Keynote ‘Designing Objects & Futures’ at the International Forum on Industrial Design (IFID) Conference

Prof. Annie Pedret gave a keynote lecture, ‘Designing Objects & Futures’ at the International Forum on Industrial Design (IFID) Conference in Luoyang, China, May 17-19.

Name of Conference: 2019 7th International Forum on Industrial Design (IFID 2019)

Date: 2019. 5. 17 ~ 5. 19

Venue: Luoyang, China

Participants: Prof. Annie Pedret

Presentation Contents:

Designing Futures and Objects

The emergent context of new technologies and tools that includes digital design, visualization technologies and Cloud Platform Service, the optimization of processes for industrial production through Design Industry Chain, design strategy, planning and management, functional concerns such as ergonomics, and the eternal subject of design aesthetics reflects the focus on optimizing of processes for industry and how the discipline of design adapts to the rapidly emergent new tools and methods.

This is a necessary discussion, but one that limits the agency and power of design and designers.  This familiar focus for design, albeit in an emergent new context, ignores the increased agency that designers could have in addressing the condition of emergence itself, seeing the world in new ways and designing in new ways.  In this paper I argue that the discipline of design needs to allow designers to shift their focus from visualizing objects and optimizing processes primarily for the benefit of industry and the market, to designing contexts and systems, from designing settings to world building, from only considering immediate trends of 1-2 years to medium term futures of 30-35 years. It is a change of focus that requires a change in methods and design education.

This paper examines the practice of the Spatial Strategies Lab combines methods from Future Studies, design thinking, design for awareness, narrative, world building with traditional design methods to imagine plausible and possible contexts of the future and the objects and spaces that inhabit those futures.  This lab operates from the premise of an expanded role of the designer from their historical focus on objects to designing future contexts and future objects. The work of the lab is based on imagination and an understanding of how things have come into being and are coming into being to visualize possible and plausible futures as a means for making decisions now that will lead us futures that we desire rather than futures that are a result of cumulative inevitability.

Luoyang, China2019-05-17 ~ 2019-05-19 written by ICRC
May 17, 2019