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Design thinking
From here to there

WRITER
Jaeuk Jung
The world changes constantly and rapidly. Designers need to be aware of these changes and our roles at every level. Knowledge and decisions need intelligent translations at a microlevel, based on delicate observations of time situations. Designers play a major role in connecting developments and visions in this complex world. We must learn how to position ourselves with the needs and possibilities of the world. The world is not only in need of creative minds but also of analytical minds, and designers with passion and persistence, who know the mechanisms of global and local situations.

There are many things wrong with design in the world today. We have flooded the world with objects, systems and technologies which seem incredible, but which are often too complex to understand or even redirect. We have lost a crucial point; what are these creations for, and what value do they add to our lives? Things may seem out of control, but they are not out of our hands. Many of the chaotic situations in the world today are the result of design decisions. "Eighty percent of the environmental impact of the products, services, and infrastructures around us is determined at the design stage." (Source: London Design Council, Annual Review 2002 p19) Design decisions form the processes behind the products we use: the materials and energy required to make them, the ways we operate them on a daily basis, and what happens to them when we no longer need them. We may not have meant to do so, and we may regret the way things have turned out, but we designed our way into the situation that faces us today.

If we can design our way into difficulty, then we can design our way out of it. Everyone designs. "Design is basic to all human activities –








the planning and patterning of any act toward a desired goal or foreseeable end, constitutes the design process." (Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (New York: Random House, 1972 p23)). Designing is what human beings do, not just what we make, and so experience, practice, and trial and error can also be considered as types of design.

If so, where do we want to be? What exactly are the "preferred situations" or "desired goals"? And, how do we get there? What courses of action will take us from here to there? To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently. When discussing where we want to be, and when looking at the world through a fresh lens, it is then that breakthroughs often occur. One of the important design challenges we face is to make the processes and systems that surround us more intelligible and knowable. We need to design our own microscopes to see them. They can help us to understand where things come from and why; life stories, food cultures, time pressures, and environments with chaotic systems. Beyond doubt, our own unaided eyes are just as important. When we understand why our present situations are as they are, we can better describe where we want to be. With alternative situations in mind, we can design the way from here to there.
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June 17, 2010 10:53 by Frederic

You definitely have a point there! (..or many points)