Similarities Between Industrial Design and Futures Work
I’ve been spending some time wondering about other fields that carry overlap with that of futures thinking. To kick things off I’m looking at some similarities between industrial design and futures work.
Now it’s quite obvious that spending some time thinking about the future is part of the creative process of most designers, including those who create physical products. In the case of industrial designers, whenever we design something we're asked to think about a new product that has yet to exist (but will hopefully one day exist in a future world). When viewed this way, it seems foresight is a skill that's inherit to the industrial design process. Here are a few other similarities between the fields. As industrial designers:
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We're informed by long-term trends... not only those in materials, production, and aesthetics, but also in terms of shifting user behaviours, preferences, and emerging technologies. Just like futures practitioners we’re monitoring change and leveraging it to augment our creations.
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We're imagining how our design(s) might exist in a world that's a few months or even a few years away. We think about how someone in the future might use our product and how it might fit into their future lives. Sometimes going as far as purposefully designing new behaviours or interactions for future citizens.
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This one’s a little obvious, but we’re actively engaged in creating the future through artifacts, ideas, and propositions. You just have to look around you to see the evidence: most things that surround you today likely involved the input of an industrial designer.
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We're naturals at the "what if?" question. What if we were to make it out of this material instead? Use this process instead? Thinking in systems and repercussions is built into our mindset.
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We speculate and create multiple solutions to the design challenge (think of creative brainstorming and pages of sketches, rows of maquettes). Some good, some less so -- this is akin to building out different scenarios/speculations and analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and desirability.
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We acknowledge that there are many ways to solve a problem, and that all solutions have the potential to be the ‘right’ answer depending on the specific circumstances (ex: both Jimmy and Taylor’s chair designs can be “correct” depending on the challenge being solved) — just like there are many ways to imagine the futures, and all versions of the future are ‘right’ given one’s frame of reference (ex: both Jimmy and Taylor’s imagination of the future are equally “correct”).
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We create prototypes to test out ideas -- kind of like creating quick speculative designs. What if we made it this shape instead? Out of this material? Let’s test it out and learn from the process/artifact.
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We create renderings and sketches depicting our future product in action -- similar to creating a vision of the future and sharing it through storytelling.
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We sometimes purposefully design critical objects or provocative designs to help think through issues -- similar to the use of design fictions. Think of furnishings/products made of strange materials, in a peculiar process, or of a highly unusual shape: perhaps they’re not the most comfortable, material efficient, or affordable but at least they encourage us to think differently about the issue at hand.
So there you go, just a few quick thoughts about the similarities between the fields of industrial design and futures thinking. It does seem as though the two are a natural pairing. What other links do you see between the two disciplines?