Editorial

This Special Issue of CoDesign has been assembled from a selection of papers presented at the 3rd Engineering and Product Design Education International Conference (EPDE05) held at Napier University in September 2005. EPDE05 was organised by the School of Design and Media Arts at Napier University in conjunction with the Design Education Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society, and the Institute of Engineering Designers, UK (IED). EPDE05 is the seventh joint conference organised by the Design Engineering Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society (formally under the auspices of SEED) and the IED.

The joint Engineering and Product Design Education conference series began in 1999, with an event on the ‘Continuum of Design Education’ at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. The event has continued on an annual basis with conferences at Derby University, Bournemouth University, Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and the University of Sussex, to name a few. Themes have always centred on the importance and relevance of education in the fields of Product and Engineering Design, with academics and industrialists travelling from all over the world to take part and share ideas with each other.

The aim of the EPDE05 conference was to explore novel approaches in design education within the wider context of product design and development. The theme ‘Crossing Design Boundaries’ reflected our wish to incorporate many of the disciplines associated with, and integral to, modern designing. For example, the increasingly significant role of anthropology in design, the psychological aspects of designed products, the development of soft computing in wearable products, and the exploitation of new media in design and how they can be best exploited within a product design framework.

The corresponding book Crossing Design Boundaries (Rodgers et al. 2005) includes a number of papers which describe discussions about product design education and the cross-over into some of the more established design fields, while a number of papers explore other specialist design areas such as interaction design, jewellery design, furniture design, and exhibition design which have been somewhat under-represented at these conferences in the past. Crossing Design Boundaries comprises a number of excellent papers which explore a number of relevant and timely issues in design, such as:

•	Interdisciplinarity
•	The Culture of Design
•	Teamwork in Design
•	Sustainability and Design
•	Philosophy and Design
•	Industrial Collaboration
•	Tools and CAD in Design
•	Communication in Design

As such the EPDE05 conference and the subsequent book Crossing Design Boundaries fits very well with the scope of this journal. CoDesign, as outlined in the editorial piece in the very first edition, sets out to be ‘inclusive’ and to ‘encourage a flow of information across the boundaries of the disciplines contributing to collaborative design’ (Scrivener 2005, p. 2). This point is reinforced in the Bureau of European Design Association's recent report (BEDA 2004) when they indicate that the designers of today and tomorrow need to be able to take in information from many sources, be flexible and comfortable working with others, be skilled in managing the dynamics of group activity, be skilled in creating the right environment to promote creative thinking, possess the ability to trawl vast seas of information, and create new and worthwhile knowledge. In short, designers will need to be able to collaborate and cooperate with many people from various disciplines who each may hold widely different perspectives on how, what and why things should be done.

Initially, over 170 EPDE05 paper abstracts were received and a total of 92 papers were carefully reviewed, selected and published in Crossing Design Boundaries. From these 92 papers, 6 have been selected to be included in this Special Issue. The six papers have been selected based on their contribution to current design thinking, particularly in the way in which they transcend and deal with the complexities and issues surrounding the discipline of design.

First, in ‘Space to reflect: combinatory methods for developing student interaction design projects in public spaces’ Lennon et al. describe a Masters-level student project focused on the ‘design of interactive media for public spaces’. Collaborative design teams, which are made up of students from a range of backgrounds including art and design, material science, education, business, computer science, engineering and communications, utilise a variety of design methods over the course of 14 weeks. Each design team, working through a complete design process, adopts a combination of methods from observational studies through to concept design, prototyping, testing and evaluation. The multidisciplinary nature inherent in this paper is illustrated best through the two case studies contained within the paper. That is, Bin-IT—a dancing, talking litter bin developed for the concourse of a busy train station, and Pedestrian Enlightenment—a system to enhance users' experiences at a signalised pedestrian crossing junction in the centre of Limerick City. The range of methods and disciplines in the case studies show, as the authors' claim, ‘how it is possible in a short time-frame to have students undertake a real-world based design project, bringing it to the stage of preliminary prototype design.’

The second paper by Reitan entitled ‘Inuit vernacular design as a community of practice for learning’ takes a very different view from the paper of Lennon et al. with respect to the way that design is taught and learnt. The author raises a fundamental question: ‘Do ordinary people design, or is the concept design reserved for academically educated professional designers?’ Reitan proposes the concept ‘vernacular design’, which she acknowledges has many similarities to the work of Christopher Alexander (Alexander 1964), to describe the understanding and the appreciation of the designs created by a group of North Alaskan Inuit (i.e. Eskimo) women. The collaborative nature of the Inuit women's designing is stressed in one of the author's key observational findings. That is, ‘the vernacular learning process was not an individual process’. Reitan informs us that her work is inspired by reflexive methodology (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000), most notably Schön's theory of reflection-in-action (Schön 1983), and Wenger's theory of community of practice (Wenger 1998) with a clear focus on the latter. Wenger's community of practice theory, the author states, is particularly relevant to an enquiry into design practices, because social learning theory fits very well with the social practice of clothing design at Kaktovik, Alaska. ‘Future research into the learning of design’, Reitan states, ‘must focus on the social aspect of learning’. A main conclusion of this work being the importance of ‘learning-by-watching’ which may support future research of the learning processes of the ‘professional’ or ‘academic’ designer.

The third paper, ‘Seven Mile Boots: the design process of a wearable art piece’, by Martin Pichlmair outlines the design process of the project ‘Seven Mile Boots’—a wearable art piece. Pichlmair's paper pushed and stretched the boundaries of what we consider as art and design more than any other during the EPDE05 conference. Although he states: ‘Art projects differ significantly from design projects’, he does go on the acknowledge that the Seven Mile Boots project relied heavily on conventional design instruments such as sketching, prototyping, and experimenting. As Pichlmair intimates: ‘The focus of this paper is on the interplay between art, design and technology in the production process.’ It is somewhere in this interplay that some of the most interesting developments in the design world can be found currently. This interplay is in evidence in the critically acclaimed work of eminent designers such as Hella Jongerius (Schouwenberg and Jongerius 2003), Martí Guixé (2002), and Thomas Heatherwick (Rodgers 2004).

In the fourth paper the authors describe an interdisciplinary project which integrates product design innovations from the global design group IDEO (Myerson 2001). In particular, the authors present the experience prototyping technique and its usage in an interdisciplinary project entitled ‘Artefact after the Fact’, which aimed to ‘weave experience design’ directly into a New York study trip. The authors describe the project which involves approximately 120 students from 5 different design disciplines, backed by a staff team with expertise ranging from Product Design to Interior Design, and with contextual input from the School of Architecture, Design History Theory and Practice. The authors suggest that interdisciplinary learning and teaching can foster product innovation and collaborative and critical team working which is rightly valued in the creative industries, and that in this way is a means of exploring the changing nature of product design.

The fifth paper, ‘Untangling the culture medium of student designers’, explores what the authors call the ‘breeding ground’ of design. The authors' main motivation lies behind ‘The fact that the designer is part of a sociocultural system (which) is under-recognised in the design community.’ The paper explores this ‘breeding ground’ or, to be more specific, the ‘culture medium’ from within the context of design education. In a similar approach to the first paper by Lennon et al., the authors here utilise a combination of methods including in-depth interviews, and an ethnographically oriented approach. The authors claim that by combining and comparing information gathered from the two case studies carried out and described here reveals some interesting insights about what the ‘culture medium’ is and how it is used in design projects.

The sixth and final paper from Marshall and Pengelly describes an ongoing, practice-based research project which deals with computing technologies and transdisciplinary design practice. The authors' coin the term ‘terrain vague’ to describe creative practice which works across traditional design disciplines, such as architecture, product design and sculpture. The authors note that an increasing number of practitioners are able and willing to negotiate working across conventional design domains (e.g. architecture, product design and sculpture) and they provide a rich list of contemporary examples, including the Thomas Heatherwick Studio, Oliver Vogt and Hermann Weizenegger, 1 Future Factories,2 and Dunne and Raby.3 Marshall and Pengelly propose that the combination of novel computer-aided design and emerging manufacturing technologies can enable new models of creative practice and posit the notion of transdisciplinarity as a critical driver for design practice.

In summary, as editor of this Special Issue of CoDesign, I would like to thank all the authors for their superb contributions. The six papers contained within this Special Issue deliberately cross a wide area of subject material from interaction design to vernacular design and from wearable art pieces to experience prototypes and from culture medium to terrain vague. However, at the heart of all this lies design, and whether you are a design researcher, a tutor, a practitioner, or a bit of all three, I am sure you will concur with the view that literally everything now depends on design. Its role as a bridge between technology and art, ideas and ends, culture and commerce is now crucial. Because design can be a major player in shaping a world where a value-enhanced user-perspective is developing, cross-disciplinary, creative alliances must be formed. I will leave the final word to Andy Milligan and Jon Rogers who perhaps sum up best the interdisciplinary nature of modern design by stating: ‘Interdisciplinarity lets us tentatively cross, and challenge, imaginary disciplinary boundaries, and in sharing our imaginations we transform our horizons.’

Dr Paul Rodgers

Reader in Design, School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University

Notes

¹ http://www.vogtweizenegger.de

² http://www.futurefactories.com

³ http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk