Why Design Futures?
GOR FuturesThe Great Ocean Road Action Plan 2018 does not underplay the range of future challenges facing the road and region. They are complex and multi-dimensional. Any models for the future of the destination will arise from explorations of possible ways to configure factors that are economic, cultural, technological, environmental and behavioural, along with options for the engineering of physical infrastructure.
The degree of difficulty of such a task must not be underestimated. All the factors that need to be aligned are interconnected in complex ways. In fact, this is a challenge that has many of the characteristics of what are known as ‘wicked problems’; particularly it cannot be approached through a reductive process trying to strategize about each of those factors in turn. With wicked problems, any effort to ‘solve’ one aspect of the problem is likely to reveal or create problems in other dimensions.
Whichever way you categorise the task of developing models for the future of the Great Ocean Road, it involves sets of relationships and complex interactions that call for transdisciplinary collaboration and integrated systems thinking, as well as the exploration of future scenarios. That is what designers do (whether as architecture, landscape, industrial, environmental, planning). Manzini (1998) refers that the process of design involves a shifting of the boundaries between ‘the thinkable’ and ‘the possible’.
The role of design in the urgent process of transforming our constructed world in response to emerging challenges, is widely recognised. There are antecedents to this project in numerous design projects undertaken over decades in the participating design schools; they all have a reputation for addressing emerging social and environmental problems. There are previous collaborative design-research programs that have brought these design schools together to combine their knowledge base and influence (see, for example: http://www.ecoinnovationlab.com, http://www.ecoacupuncture.com, www.visionsandpathways.com). Those programs worked with thousands of students and community participants over more than a decade, demonstrating the potential of a design-led process to ‘rethink the bounds of the possible’, to open-up alternatives to the unsustainability of ‘business as usual’. (Such work aligns with similar university programs in other countries such as www.desisnetwork.org.)
Designing the future is a way of engaging with critical, creative and speculative, thinking; perhaps its most critical contribution is the visual communication of future possibilities that can garner public attention and catalyse change.
Why futures research through university design schools?
Post-graduate design education is based on a pedagogical approach where students integrate multidisciplinary knowledge by undertaking design-research, conceptual analysis and the exploration of possible ways of shaping our constructed world. This core, integrative component of design education is known as ‘the studio’. Typically, a studio will bring together students focusing on a project; in this case the students are mostly professionals extending their undergraduate education for a Masters in design.
In a world-wide movement over the last decade, design schools have been able to orient their pedagogical and research activities towards innovation, becoming design laboratories generating new visions, new approaches to environmental and social challenges. They have become a powerful force for opening up the future.
