Fast forward: design economies and practice in the near future

This chapter proposes a reflection and discussion on the behavioural and attitudinal change in creativity and engagement that is branching in and out of design to generate new connections to industry and inform new ways to work, produce, socialise, and innovate. Recently, new channels are being experimented with to create products and services that, linked to the new socio-economical and technological drivers, are proposing novel design scenarios. These encompass emergent drivers and phenomena such as personal manufacturing, peer production, crowd funding, and are influenced by greater societal, political and environmental factors such as the green imperative and need for more sustainable productive practice and behaviours, and the budget cuts in public administrations derived from the 2008 economic crisis. The chapter, begins from the understanding that firms, people, and the public sector are being challenged by the drivers mentioned above, and asks the question: how is design evolving to respond to this new landscape? The answers hope to open discussions that investigate the emergence of a new type of creative firm and entrepreneur, the characteristics of a new kind of designer or a designer-citizen, and a renewed type of connection between designer, user, and organization. Although seemingly now pervasive within understandings of the future of design, this topic has just begun to be explored, both from an academic perspective and from the perspective of practitioners as it underlines a revolution that touches upon work and human practices, and reforms traditional proprietary processes towards more participative arenas for proposing and sharing ideas. Designers are contributing to the wide experimentation connected to these topics both through direct creative input – for example experimenting news ways to design objects collaboratively with people through digital tools – and through facilitating processes that enable all stakeholders address problems directly – for example experimenting new approaches to support the public sector in developing new participative processes for decision making. Design and creativity can give meaning to tools and technologies that help people understand and develop processes of collaboration, and inspire a different way to be entrepreneurs and citizens. Here this is explored through the idea of a more resilient and convivial society as essential ingredients for creating stronger design systems. According to Illich, a convivial society is based on invention, and promotes people as co-creators of social processes. This idea is extremely relevant to the imagining of new socio-economical and industrial systems while offering the starting point to educate new types of citizens. How can the new organizational processes trigger different entrepreneurial models and innovation in products and services? How can collaborative making practices, enabled by social technologies, be properly explored and practiced? How is this contributing to re-shaping and upgrading the design process? These are but a few of the questions this chapter seeks to briefly investigate, without looking for definitive answers but rather aiming at contributing to the wider dialogue already unfolding around the future of design.