Please introduce yourself, your role in the DRS and your research.
I am Rachel Cooper, I am currently President of DRS, an honour that as a graduating design student over 40 years ago, I would never have perceived possible. Especially because when I graduated the Design Research Society was in its early years. I am a Distinguished Professor of Design Management and Policy at Lancaster University, where I formed ImaginationLancaster in 2006. Imagination is an open and exploratory design-led research centre conducting applied and theoretical research into people, products, places, and their interactions. When I formed Imagination, I specifically didn't use the term design in its title because I want our research to continually push the boundaries of design.
My own research interests cover design thinking; design management; design policy; and across all sectors of industry operating in the physical and digital world, a specific interest of mine is design for wellbeing and socially responsible design. I am series editor of the Routledge series Design for Social Responsibility and also founding editor of The Design Journal.
Choose 5 items from the DRS Digital Library
The DRS Digital Library is an amazing resource, especially if you are interested like me on the transformation and development of design research over the past 50 years. Hence, I choose to look back at the first conference, organized by Reg Talbot in Manchester in 1971, the proceedings were edited by my predecessor as President of DRS Nigel Cross. The focus of the conference was User Participation, and it was interesting to learn how much effort they put into designing the conference for delegate participation, much, if not more than we do today, and that the conference was recorded so that participants could watch again.
The first speaker was Rayner Banham who said ‘'Participation', in any radical sense, is about giving all the people access to the tools, resources and power which have been the jealously guarded prerogatives of the professionals.’ We are still working on participation today, through participatory design, co-design etc.
There are papers on participation research in urban planning, in architecture, in automotive and in medicine. Alongside this discourse, there was also discussion on the socio-technical issues of computer-aided design techniques.
Nicholas Negroponte's paper explores the bridges necessary between environmental hardware and computing software to achieve a 'res- ponsive' architecture. The Architecture Machine Group at MIT concerned itself with aspects of artificial intelligence in the context of architectural design. He identified three aspects of intelligence which the environment must possess - recognising, responding, and learning - and discusses alternative examples of achieving these through computation. Today everyone it seems is concerned about Artificial Intelligence but with much more concern about the pervasive nature it is having on society and economies.
There are many more names we recognise, such as Bill Mitchell (who I had the pleasure to spend time with at MIT Design Lab in 2006). Bill’s paper covered experiments with participation-oriented computer systems in urban planning and architecture. While Chris Evans discussed doctors who ‘when they are diagnosing ulcers, employ very simple algorithms. Yet they take seven or more years of training to acquire these simple algorithms’. Not today 50 years on.
The conference was summarised by two well known people. John Chris Jones, the first professor of design at the Open University, he commented that ‘every professional role shrinks us into being simple algorithms. If we can move away from being professionals, we will be moving into personal growth, rather than personal shrinkage. ‘
Robert Jungk, Austrian writer, journalist, historian, and peace campaigner, who later in 1986 he set up the International Futures Library in Salzburg. He said ‘What I missed… was discussion of what kind of changes in people might occur in the next twenty or thirty years. When we talk about participation, we have been talking about the people who are in control today. If we could have a new Karl Marx who would base his vision of a new social order not only on economic change, but also on psychological or anthropological change, then I think we might be getting somewhere.’ He said what he missed was the political dimension of the discussion.
The whole set of papers in the proceedings are fascinating to read and I urge you to take a look, many topics we are concerned with today are covered; socio-technical and socio-political issues, the environment, user participation, and finally algorithms. What I found fascinating too is the discipline breadth of the participants this included design, building science, engineering, architecture, political sciences, environmental sciences. As DRS has matured and grown, we have of course become a large community of design related disciplines, it would be great to have another cross disciplinary conference to yet again engage with a diverse community to look at planetary and human futures.
The people involved in this first conference played a key role in the future of the discipline, the DRS now relies on a new generation of academics, to take us forward. This is what membership of the DRS community can do, help us all think about how to apply design research to help humanity and the planet flourish in the next 50 years.
- Brian Mark Evans and Andrew Wootton like this.