Hi Jack, I'd like to throw in (rather rough and unordered):
* Designing for sustainability (one could argue that good design has always considered & done this) * Design as an agent for economic, political, and social change (see Marc's reply, as well) * Design Thinking (also already hinted at by Marc) – IMHO an important differentiation lies in the topic of analytical (the common method of thought which we are mainly schooled and elsewise trained for) vs. synthetical strategies for tackling a problem space. (Someone in the back of my head also is waving a sign with ‘exploration!’ and ‘iterations!’ written on it in large print & bold) Of course, in practice there should be no ‘versus’ applied, but a rather strong ‘and’. ;-) * Agility (see also Laura's reply) – most agencies and the people in/around them still seem to think/run in a waterfall model. Especially if they have their background in print or more traditional ID. I'd like to make a bet that at least some change is ahead here. * Cross-media and media agnostic design strategies * Designing for behaviour – though I'd still like to argue against Fabricant that all communicative human activity aims at influencing behaviour, somehow – behaviour is utterly relevant, but IMHO definitely NOT a kind of medium, and even less a design-specific one (might provide a good starting point for a discussion to reflect on the specific core ‘materials’ one is concerned with) * Design as a ‘pure’ service industry producing media artifacts vs. design as consultancy or development partnership. The typical artifacts produced by designers in the latter case become more a kind of (necessary & important) side-product then (hopefully a rather well refined and distilled one). * Speculative/discourse/fictional design (e.g. much work done at RCA's Designing Interactions programme) vs. applied solutions. * Many-to-many communication * Mass customisation BTW, it might be interesting to read e.g. Otl Aicher's seminal “Die Welt als Entwurf” (World as Design) as an important historical trace of current ideas re: design thinking and the like. In any case, I think that designers should become better aware of designs own short (intellectual) history. The whole discipline could still improve on reflecting itself (ha! à propos, another interesting read: D. Schoen ‘The Reflective Practitioner’ ;-)) Besides: a notable topic to look for when reflecting on design as discipline or designer's self-conception: designer's omnipotence (modernism[?]) vs. designer's impotence (post-modernism[?]) in terms of impact on the world around us. Cheers, Sascha -- &:create ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
