Facilitators: Susu Nousala, David Ing, and Peter Jones – Tongji U., Aalto U, and OCAD University
Since 2014, an international collaborative of design leaders have been exploring ways in which methods can be augmented, transitioning from the legacy focus on products and services towards a broad range of complex socio-technical systems and contemporary societal problems.
At the September 2015 RSD4 Symposium, DesignX founder Don Norman presented a keynote talk on the frontiers of design practice and the necessity for advanced design education for highly complex sociotechnical problems. He identified the qualities of these systems as relevant to DesignX problems and called for systemics, transdisciplinarity and the need for high-quality observations (or evidence) in design problems. Initial directions were proposed in the first DesignX workshop in October 2015, which have been published in the new design journal She Ji. In October 2016, the second DesignX workshop was held at Tongji University in Shanghai, overlapping with the timing of the RSD5 Symposium.
We propose to sustain the relationships between RSD and DesignX with this half-day workshop, proposed to explore the relationships between systemic design, the DesignX agenda and educational programs. We invite RSD participants engaged in both of these contexts to join in a collaborative discussion aimed at further developing the design and education agendas in these discourse communities. We aim to capture experiences and insights from design leaders, educators and practitioners in Toronto, as input, validation and/or suggestions for further development of the DesignX direction.
