Design Process Talks

On the 17th of March we are going to be undertaking a one week intensive module throughout the whole of Design and Craft, similar to ‘Change by Design’. On Tuesday the 25th February we received a full day of lectures regarding the forthcoming week from a variety of different speakers.

The day kickstarted with yet another inspiring talk from Mike Press which was entitled ‘Fashioning Change’. Raising awareness of new design directions to address the changes in society such as ageing population, health and wellbeing, technological advances, sustainability and many more, Press encouraged us to really think about our target audience for future products/services.

Focusing on the issue of age, the idea of ‘age’ as being a socially determined thing was brought up. With ‘youth’ being the ideal of beauty in todays society, the majority of the population is left feeling past it or unwanted. But with the emerging culture of the ‘young old’ we are beginning to see a change in the way older generations are portrayed as they are increasingly having more sex, leading healthier, more active lifestyles and even living out different maps of life.

Leading on from this, Mike Press went on to talk about how society, market, safety and technology is driving this change in design, creating different opportunities for us designers. Giving examples from Stefano Giovani, Sophie Chandler and others Press left us with the question ‘As an interior designer, what can we do?’.

After a short break our second guest speaker - Fraser Bruce took to the stage with the quote “Unknown unknowns. The things we don’t know, we don’t know” addressing the complex problems in society today and how will we tackle them? Bruce encouraged us to look at the bigger picture and sparked the idea of co-design for our upcoming projects which involves everyday people being included throughout the design process. Once again he really drilled in the importance of prototyping, suggesting to do it early and often and if we can’t make it, fake it!

After this Jen White who runs the Design for Services course at DJCAD gave us a brief talk about the importance of making. Suggesting that we should be doing this for a variety of reasons other than visualising ideas including to learn tech skills, as self expression, to visualise the future and sell things. In regards to our upcoming design week, White asked us to consider the idea of shaping the way people behave rather than form of an object, by looking at service design.

Our final talk of the day was from a past textiles student at DJCAD, Jen Ballie, eco-textile designer. Looking briefly into how textiles could be intertwined with changes such as social media technology, Ballie talked us through how she had put co-design to practice as part of her phD work. Teaming up with other fashion students in London, she ran a workshop allowing members of the public to drop in and up cycle their garments quickly and easily including the consumers in the design process. Overall the day was very interesting and left us all with a lot to think about. Unable to tell us the exact brief we will be working towards in a few weeks time, I feel the speakers have left us with a good idea of the processes we will have to undertake in our teams. Excited!