Facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Empowering (human) design agency and capabilities through experimental learning

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2014) is a paradigm characterized by the convergence of technological changes that impact the nature of work, the design and materialization of products and services, as well as their market, their structure, and their relations with human agents. This systemic process also changes the design field, its cultural and socio-economic structures, its consolidated domains and practices. We witness both new opportunities for, but threats to, the conventional system of human imaginative and operational capacities that are changing how they can be learned. The re-discussion of the design(er) role affects the structure and meaning of the discipline, as well as the processes, places, and capacities that can generate learning. Design education is a core component of this change. It is so for those who will shortly become designers and for retrofitting the knowledge and skills of practitioners and educators. The article reviews the main studies and theories on the transformation of the production system and the market. The focus is on the structural factors which enable identification of the leading transformational drivers of the experimental learning. These factors are the basis upon which changes in design education and designer skills operating within digital distributed socio-technical systems will be defined.