What is the Future of Industrial Design?

This paper will present a picture of what industrial design might be in the future, as well as
tested examples of what this could mean in practice. It uses empirical material from
workshops by 32 faculty members in the area of design and personal written reflections of
102 members of design faculty and students.
The paper will show three types of change that we might expect in the future: changes in
our artistic basis, changes in what types of new skills are needed, and new intellectual ways
of approaching design.

DRS 2012 Bangkok

Mobile Marketplace Designing Digital Devices to Connect Rural & Urban China

The paper describes the methodology and process of an ongoing research project,
conducted by Studio TAO and Tongji University with Nokia, to demonstrate how
c
digital communication devices can help bridge the social gap between rural and
urban China. Rapid growth, substantial socio-economic changes, and massive
migration from the countryside to the urban areas, are creating an imbalance in
the urban-rural system. No visible value is given to activities and resources related
to the countryside. Young people move to urban areas to find a job to economically
sustain their families; social fabric is weakening and traditional practices and
local skills are disappearing. DESIGN Harvest explores ways to connect rural
areas with the city to enhance the exchange of resources. This approach is being
prototyped in the context of Chongming Island, near Shanghai. The proximity of
the island to the city, and the way it has maintained its rural identity, despite
Shanghai's fast pace of growth, makes it ideal for researching the relationship
between the two realities. Together with Nokia, we started researching how
communication devices can help enhance connections through prototypes, models
of interaction and service systems. In the initial phase we combined desk-based
research and ethnography to understand users. A set of tools and practices were
designed and tested for immersive exploration and to define user characteristics
for the later developed scenarios and concept generation phase. The need of a
specific methodology is due to the user group's peculiar profile, and no previous
specific study. Language based problems and semantic bias were also encountered.
The paper explains the methodology and the design guidelines for the concept
generation phase. Finally,design proposals are presented. Although these
proposals are the result of extensive research in the Shanghai/Chongming context,
modular and exportable design characteristics will be clarified, for possible
adoption in different contexts.

DRS 2012 Bangkok

Upcycling: Where function follows form

Up-cycling is a “responsible” design approach in which designers seek to put discarded
consumer products, such as bottles, to new and valuable uses, such as making lampshades.
Since that approach involves finding new functions for extant manufactured forms, upcycled
products
appear
to
be
typical
of other products created as a result of both designers
and users adapting extant forms to serve entirely different functions. This form-adaptive
approach appears to reverse the causal direction implied by Louis Sullivan's famous
dictum "form ever follows function". This paper then reviews antecedents of the up-cycling
approach historically, in order to critically examine the form-function relationship in
selected examples of engineering, weapon and consumer product design.
The example of the Venturi tube shows that it can form a component of products with
functions as different as wind instruments, carburettors and jet pumps. Although the
Venturi effect can only be created by a tube of very specific form, the functions it performs
can be very different. Furthermore it is shown that the Venturi effect can be created without
use of a Venturi tube, by means of adapting the extant parts of a gas turbine to create a
novel secondary compressor.
The same form-adaptive approach can be found in primitive tools which evolved into
weapons such as the mace and the billhook. Ceremonial versions of the mace show that the
communication of ideas is a crucial function of many designs. Since beliefs and values
change over time, communicative functions are not temporally fixed. It is argued that the
primary function of many up-cycled products is to comment positively on sustainability
issues by demonstrating how consumer waste can be transformed into something far more
valuable by creative virtuosity. Consequently, up-cycled designs appear to function less
successfully in helping to physically manage post-consumer wastes.

DRS 2012 Bangkok