I suppose it is only natural that as one gets older one becomes more self-aware. In the process, we start to see our own past from a different perspective. Perhaps this understanding allows us to see how other people might have seen our younger selves at the time. It is the kind of reflective feeling one hears all the time in the lyrics of songs, especially songs called ‘Changes’. Numerous artists have released songs titled ‘Changes’ over the years. David Bowie is an obvious one that springs to mind, as is the unusually sedate (for them) song by Black Sabbath. However, those selections are only the result of my age and personal predilections. Apparently, according to Google, the title has also been used for songs by 2Pac and XXXTentacion, but I have never even heard of them. So there.
I am sure a lot of the changes I have noticed in myself are perfectly normal. I hope so. There are the usual less hair, less energy, and more weight kind of changes, of course. I suspect an increase in common sense, and not taking overly dangerous risks, but that might just be down to slower reactions. I have noticed in myself, though, a marked tendency not to worry as much as I used to about what other people think, and from my personal observations of people older than me, that does indeed seem to be a perfectly natural transition.
When I typed ‘transitions’ into Google, the first thing that came up was a track of that name by the Beastie Boys, followed by an advert for photochromic spectacle lenses. Not quite what I expected, but there you go. I was looking for something more reflective. Spiritual even? Ruminations on how life is really a series of transitions from one life stage to another; realization that the only certain thing in life (apart, as Franklin said, from death and taxes) is change. Change is the only way we grow and develop. As designers, we deal with change on an everyday basis, and change inevitably involves the transition from one state of affairs to another. In fact, most of the papers in this particular issue involve transitions of one kind or another.
Bofylatos and Telalbasic’s paper, ‘Service startups and creative communities: two sides of the same coin?’, contrasts two types of service-based organization. The authors highlight the shift from products to services in service startups – a kind of dematerialization where products only serve to provide access to services rather than act as ‘fetishized status symbols’. They then compare this approach with that of creative communities, which adopt social innovation in order to ‘co-design solutions to problems of everyday life’ that aim to reduce the flow of materials and energy, and which may then evolve into business ventures. While both can be seen as being involved with design for sustainability, there is a clash of ideologies between the two as they have very different drivers. Service startups are profit-driven whereas creative communities aim for economic, social, and environmental benefit. Both, however, can be seen as precursors of a transition from the modernist project of unsustainable consumerism to a more sustainable future.
In ‘The unknown position of intuition in design activity’ Çizgen and Uraz look at the transitions between different work patterns over time, focusing on intuition as designerly behaviour – ‘a valid form of cognition to cope with the ambiguous nature of the design task’. The research study compared the role intuition played in the problem-solving approaches taken by architects having less than 10 years’ experience and architects with over 30 years’ experience. Adopting a known ‘integrated framework of intuition’, most were found to use ‘direct matching’ – seeing immediate solutions based on past experience – a low-risk approach requiring little in the way of effort. The second most used approach was ‘associative matching’ – spontaneously generating blue-sky ideas without explaining in depth. This was followed by ‘incremental synthesis’ – the creation of new interpretations and solutions not by following previous experience but by reconstructing existing knowledge. Finally, only a few used ‘radical synthesis’ – the deliberate abandoning of the known and putting forward radically new ideas. The authors conclude that as designers gain in experience, they tend to use more tacit, unconscious, and spontaneous behaviour, yet with more control and limitations in breaking with past experience. Younger designers, on the other hand, are more prone to adopt idea generation by ‘associative matching’.
The transitions described in the following three papers all address potential shifts in the role of the professional designer in the take-up of amateur or lay design input in the design process. Heenop, Munro, and Chmela-Jones’ paper ‘A shift in the research design approach’ reports on the problems in updating an ageing and outdated signage and wayfinding system in a public library, using human-centred design thinking in an attempt to find a suitable and sustainable solution. The study adopted participatory action research methods as a democratic way of engaging all stakeholders, empowering participants, and breaking down hierarchical barriers between designer/researcher and library staff. The results indicate that removing the hierarchy, while seemingly desirable and beneficial to some participants, makes the design process far slower than traditional graphic design approaches. Also, it acts to remove the authority of the designer as the expert in design. The co-design process necessitates aesthetic compromises being made, and the implementation of this democratic approach makes the production of design problematic.
A similar co-design process, challenging the traditional roles and authority of those involved in the design and design management processes, is explored in Liu, Moultrie, and Ye’s paper ‘The customer-dominated innovation process’. The authors note that technology has changed the relationship between companies and their customers by enabling far better communication and interaction between the two. Research has shown, in some cases, there is strong evidence of the success of co-designed or customer-produced products over those generated in-house. The paper describes three examples of companies successfully taking advantage of the ‘design with’ (as opposed to the ‘design for’) approach. Analysis of these case studies suggests that their success relied on establishing the right criteria, providing appropriate online tools, and, importantly, developing a virtual community of idea generators that are rewarded (with money or status) for their design input. The process, though, is not without its issues. This approach changes the role of in-house design teams, which move from concept generation activities to evaluation and implementation of other people’s concepts. Additionally, traditional new product development processes consist of numerous phase-review stages, providing design management teams with a series of built-in decision-making points for assessing a project’s status and approving the next stage of work. The research indicates that in a customer-dominated innovation process, such gatekeeping decisions are better undertaken by the virtual communities of customers/users themselves.
In ‘What makes good design?’ the author, So, assesses the differences in the ways experts and non-experts evaluate design. The study applied psychometrics – the science of measuring mental capacities and processes – to determine how non-experts perceive design and how well non-experts’ design vocabulary predicted preferences. Using in-depth statistical analysis of numerous tests, So found that the degree to which people like a particular product is best explained by the emotions that that product elicits in the user. The author proposes that the communication gap that exists between designers and users needs to be bridged in order to implement best a user-centred design approach, and offers the measurement instrument developed during the research as a way of bridging that gap.
Similarly dealing with aesthetics and emotions is Zingoni’s paper ‘Beyond aesthetics, empathy first’. Zingoni’s pedagogic study looks at designers’ use of empathy in designing for others, using the case study of an interior design student ‘service learning’ project ‘Design, make, gift a dream’. The author notes that while empathy is a skill that is intrinsic to design, it is one that is not often explicitly taught. This is despite the fact that with the growing acceptance of user-centred design processes, empathy has become much more of a priority. The students were asked to select from ‘dreams’ or wishes provided by long-term care patients at a children’s hospital, then design and make the ‘dream’ and gift it to the child. As the students could not meet the children involved, they had to learn empathy by proxy rather than through the more usual routes of observation and interaction. A valuable result arising from the study is the tool generated to measure empathic design awareness and development.
The papers conclude with a PhD study report by Sharon Yoon – ‘Entrance as a non-peripheral space in a theme park design’. The report describes the entrances to a theme park housed inside a Korean department store. While the report addresses a very niche aspect, it is part of a wider proposed study surveying the narratives of Korean theme park design.
Finally comes a valuable review of the book Crits: A Student Manual by Terry Barrett. The reviewer, James Corrazzo, dissects the manual with some wit, and tries the techniques suggested with his own students. As a result, he assesses its value to be as much for the educator as for the student. Highly recommended.