Undisciplined knowledge in the digital age

Design disciplines and territories are expanding rapidly, due to the increasing importance of design as one of the means potentially helping to respond to grand global challenges. Designers are currently required to work in dynamic ways, and to be capable of approaching wicked problems creatively in many different areas of knowledge. If on the one hand this scenario is very present in design practice, the knowledge transferred during education doesn’t seem as up to the task as it should be. Studio-based learning is still the core pedagogical approach for design where the ethos is put on the relationship between master and apprentice, the physical encounter, and the hands-on spirit of contextual enquiry. We contend that this tradition is now facing a turning point, linked both to teaching methods, and to the increasing importance of diverse types of data and disruptive technologies in the design project. Drawing on the direct experience developed in a 28-months European co-funded research project, where industries, creative professionals, and design educators were consulted to co-develop a framework of competences for the digital creative professional of the future, we discuss the implications of the current changes for the discipline. We propose that, for the future knowledge designers will need, there is value in teaching/practicing the development of ill-defined solutions as well as ill-defined problems, where the system (product, service, interaction) developed is itself a learning actor. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility of adopting a blurred design approach, less divided by individual approaches, but based on a dynamic mix of competences coming from different disciplines that would help evolve design knowledge outside of the traditional disciplinary boundaries.