reconceptualized. The focus now is on multicultural, social, and humanistic levels of achievement as the foundation for the traditional skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Older schoolchildren have learning experiences that provide activities of co-design thinking and making.

They initially learn by co-designing with each other. By the time they graduate from high school, they will have learned how to bring others together in co-designing efforts. What we used to call service learning at the high school level now consists of experiences in participatory design with members of the local community.

At the university level, designing is a core component of all curricula in every department. The design process is the path that we take to go between and open the doors to the disciplinary silos. Faculty members are rewarded for transdisciplinary successes as well as for discipline-specific goals.

Some students will choose to focus their education on design and learn the skills and frameworks of hybrid designer/design researchers. They can choose whether to focus on a practical route or an academic route.

Those who aim to go into practice will learn how to make tools and select the materials to facilitate the creativity of others. Those who choose the academic route will explore and experiment with complex social systems in collaboration with students from across the world through socially engaged networks. Students can also choose to have feet in both camps if they plan to practice and teach others who aim to enter practice.

CONCLUSION

Over the past 30 years, almost every aspect of doing design has changed.

We still seem to be in the middle of a transition to greater entanglement and complexity, but with greater involvement of people and, hopefully, more value contributed by the design capabilities of many. We can anticipate these uncertainties with hope or fear. But if we can use design thinking, making, and enacting to visualize and explore the future together, then we will be able to harness our collective creativity to serve our collective dreams.

Endnotes

1. Sanders, E.B.-N. Ethnography and the empowerment of everyday people. White Paper for Microsoft Corporation, 2004.

2. Stappers, P.J., van Rijn, H., Kistemaker, S.C., Hennink, A.E., and Sleeswijk Visser, F. Designing for other people’s strengths and motivations: Three cases using context, visions, and experiential prototypes. Advanced Engineering Informatics 23, 2 (2009), 174–183.

3. Sanders, E.B.-N. and Stappers, P.J.

Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. BIS Publishers, 2012.

4. Sanders, L. and Simons, G. A social vision for value co-creation in design. Open Source Business Resource. Dec. 2009; http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/ article/view/1012/973

5. Bansal, S. Innovation within reach.

The Ne w York Times . Aug. 21, 2014; http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.

com/2014/08/21/innovation-within-reach/ 6. Rittel, H. W.J. and Webber, M.M.

Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.

Policy Sciences 4, 2 (1973), 155–169.

7. Sanders, E.B.-N. and Stappers, P.J. Probes, toolkits and prototypes: Three approaches to making in codesigning. CoDesign 10, 1

(2014), 5–14.

8. Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., and Evenson, S. Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2007, 493–502.

9. Stappers, P.J. Doing design as a part of doing research. In Design Research Now. R.

Michel, ed. Birkhäuser, Basel, 2007, 81–91.

10. Sleeswijk Visser, F. , Stappers, P.J., Van der Lugt, R., and Sanders, E.B.-N. Contextmapping: Experiences from practice. CoDesign 1, 2 (2005) 119–149.

 

Liz Sanders has a background in psychology and anthropology. Over the past three decades, she has practiced co-designing across all the design disciplines, developing methods, tools and techniques to drive and/ or inspire design from a human-centered perspective. She is the founder of Make Tools, a company that explores new spaces in emerging design landscapes. She also teaches in the Design Department at The Ohio State University.

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Pieter Jan Stappers is professor of design techniques at Delft University of Technology’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.

His research has focused on developing tools and techniques that support the early phases of design processes. Together with colleagues and Ph.D. students, he leads the contextmapping research initiative in Delft, developing design research methods and tools and bringing these to education and practice.

→ [e-mail]

Design and design research are one and the same at the front end. The front end is transdisciplinary, and the problems that designers and design researchers find themselves involved with are wicked, in the sense that there is no sharply specified problem or no simple criteria for a single solution. Rather, problem solving is a complex process of sensemaking and intervention, with spinoffs along the way [ 6]. Transdisciplinary social networks of people work collectively to address wicked problems across continents. Success goes hand in hand with sustainable and convivial ways of living.

Who will design? Everyone can be involved in designing and gains relevant learning experiences throughout their education to enable their participation. The people whom we currently call designers are the toolmakers, making the tools and providing the materials the rest of us use to imagine and express our collective ideas about future experience. These toolmakers focus on making sense of the future as well as on giving shape to the future [ 7].

What will be designed? The people who are today’s designers and design researchers are the facilitators and shapers of the collective dreams of the people in 2044. We now understand the intricate relationships between the three levels of value in co-designing (i.e., monetary vs. experience vs. social values) and we know how and when to promote each. The success of a project is judged on a complex set of qualities; the old bottom line of financial profit will be difficult to discern in the complex business models that incorporate the indirect effects and feedback loops needed to manage the networked society.

How will people be educated?

Elementary school children learn about designing and co-designing through practical and fun hands-on experiences. They have classes, events, and workshops in making, repairing, reusing, and repurposing.

Hacking comes later, in middle school.

There is no gender tag on the creative domains. Boys learn to knit and sew while girls make interactive things and things out of wood. The educational standards for assessment have been

 

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2014 INTERACTIONS 33 INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG DOI: 10.1145/2670616 COP YRIGHT HELD BY AUTHORS. PUBLICATION RIGH TS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00