The mutual impact of contemporary challenges and design transitions: perspectives on product development

The brief history of industrial design has witnessed several turns during its evolution. A long time has passed since design was about finding the correct language for machine-made mass products, and balancing the form with the function. In those times, the debate was about the role of designers in a world that was optimistic about pro-gress and keen to believe the most significant design impact would be to drive innovation. In a few decades, design gained worldwide recog-nition for its effectiveness in helping businesses succeed by interpret-ing new technology in user-friendly ways, adding value, and success-fully communicating it. During this time, designers and researchers made efforts to represent the process applied in design to develop new products, and such representations helped define the discipline ap-proach, reflect on it, and explain it to others. These efforts evolved and diversified into many versions, but today, no single scheme is agreed upon and shared by the design community. Yet, looking at their evolu-tion, it is possible to see how they developed with the discipline and adapted to change. Indeed, designers widened their work’s scope and started to question its meaning and impact on a larger scale, involving people and communities, aiming at social innovation, setting sustaina-ble goals, and transitioning into new design approaches. While the awareness of being part of a larger scheme is not new, the urgency of today’s challenges is affecting he whole design community. From this perspective, the design process should reflect the mutual impact of contemporary challenges and design transitions. This paper describes an overview of the design process representations from an evolution-ary perspective, focussing on product development. An insight into the phases of the design process is offered to see where the newest tech-nologies – AI in particular – are merging with design and, possibly, col-laborating through the transition.