From designing to co-designing to collective dreaming

Abstract

Over the past three decades we have witnessed shifts, connections, and reframings in just about every area of design: how design is done, who is doing it, for what goals, and what its results are. These changes show a move from the designing of things to interactions to systems, and from designing for people to designing with people and by people. In this article we look at the development of design practice over the past 30 years and then look briefly into the future, from a co-design perspective. Our goal is to sketch a map of how these ingredients hang together and to illustrate that with examples from cases and underlying principles. Our perspective is informed by academic writing, but more so by our experiences with design practice in both industry and academia. Neither of us is a designer in the traditional sense; rather, we are practitioners and educators of co-designing. The observations here stem from many years of developing design research in the “fuzzy front end,” connecting design research to conceptualization and development, and educating future co-designers.