I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.

For the complete essay…

From Eye blog at eyemagazine.com

Victor Margolin, Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a lucid thinker and vivid critic, shared some critical thoughts with Ksenija Berk last winter, in this two-part interview. His overview of basic ideas in design thinking brought to light some thoughts that could foster positive change in society – and in design itself, which all too often forgets its chief goal: the wellbeing of all mankind.

Professor Margolin argues that design can’t introduce positive changes into any society if we fail to create a sustainable economy on a global scale. Sustainability is a fundamental value of life, not something that can be found solely in a product; it is a total way of living.

More…

The final issue of Volume 3 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.

Volume 3, Number 6 contains:

• Designing the Holocaust at the Sites of the Shoah and Museum Stores by Cayo Gamber.
• Clean Water, Deep Learning: A Design Project about Water Quality in the Wilson River Catchment Area, Northern River of New South Wales by Leonie Lane.
• New Concept of Immateriality within the Architectural Context by Ozlem Kandemir.
• Evolutionary Performance: Passive Design for a Hotel in Central India by James Kraus.
• Artefacts: A Site for Poetic Inquiry by Stephen Wischer and Megan Gette.
• DIY and Co-creation: Representatives of a Democratizing Tendency by JanWillem Hoftijzer.
• Design, Violence and Subjectivity by Colin Davies.
• What is Good Fashion Design? The Shift in Fashion Education of the 21st Century by Noël Palomo-Lovinski and Steven Faerm.
• Evolutionary Formfinding: Conceptual Integration of Patterns and Physical Aspects by Julia Stratil.
• Complexity, Human Agents, and Architectural Design: A Computational Framework by Yin Gao and Ning Gu.
• Interactive Systems Design in Retail Environments: Dramatic Structure as Sense-making Strategy by Catherine Hu and Lawrence Lau.
• Living Upgrade by Design: A Vision for the Future by João Martins and Luis Mota.

• Integration in Architectural Design: Methods and Implementations by Ajla Aksamija.
• Semantic Interference Effects of Text and Images in Stories Presented on Web by Gopala Krishna Koduri, Amitash Ojha and Bipin Indurkhya.
• The Collaborative Redesign of Wikipedia: How Templates Transformed a Content Management System into a Social Networking Architecture by Matthijs den Besten.
• Install: Understanding, Consilience, and Communication by Román Montoto.
• How Learning from Automotive Sound Quality can Inform Urban Soundscape Design by Rebecca Cain and Paul Jennings.
• Development of a QFD Based Collaborative Design Approach to Reduce Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) by Himan Kanishka Gardiye Punchihewa and Diane Elizabeth Gyi.
• Spatiality, the Gas Turbine Jet Engine and Developmental Design by Rhodri Windsor Liscombe.
• Copy & Paste: Design in the Era of Postproduction by Lorenzo Imbesi.
• Teaching Eco-Fashion: Is Sustainable Fashion a New Paradigm? by Linda T. Lee and Rosalie Regni.
• Traces, Relics & X-rays: The Form of Absence by Paul Robinson.
• The Berlin Manifesto: Social Transformation for Sustainable Design by Patrick J. Ashton and Matthew Kubik.
• [Re]Vision: The Role of Graphic Design[ers]… by Samantha Lawrie.
• A Practice of Ephemeral Urban Design by Rochus Urban Hinkel.
• Research, Collaboration and Community in an Interactive Design Curriculum by Adream Blair-Early.
• The Governing Principle behind Design: Part I: Unifying Methodologies, Disciplines and Cultures through the Physical Principle of Least Action pp by Chris Thaxton, Wendy Winn, Jay Fenwick, Terry McClannon and Margot Olson.
• The Governing Principle behind Design: Part II: The Least Action Principle, Transparency, and Universalization by Chris Thaxton, Wendy Winn, Jay Fenwick, Terry McClannon and Margot Olson.
• The Governing Principle behind Design: Part III: Generalization of the Physical Principle of Least Action to the Design Process by Chris Thaxton.

Congratulations to Olga den Besten, John Horton, Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey, the winners of the International Award for Excellence in the area of design principles and practices for their paper Building a ‘box’: Discourses of School Design in the UK

Abstract: There is currently considerable activity in the UK directed towards the reconstruction or refurbishment of secondary and primary schools. In this context, the paper looks closely at various discourses that evolve around school architecture. The omnipresent discourses at the national level are those of and around Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – a major government school building programme. BSF is presented and perceived as an ambitious project set out to bring radical changes for the better not only to material conditions of schooling, but also to the concept of secondary education itself. However, as the “first waves” of BSF are carried out, reports are emerging in the media that express disappointment with the project. At the local level, we have found, through an in-depth ethnographic research in several British schools, an array of discourses that contribute to the complex decision-making process of creating an individual school building. Such discourses, in which school staff, pupils, architects, consultants or local authorities are engaged, carry with them very concrete implications for the design of material school spaces. For example, a discourse of heritage brought in by the architects in one of our case-studies, resulted in a particular – rectangular – shape of the future school building, which would be congruent with the industrial past of the area where the school is situated. The paper also shows how the national BSF discourses are translated to the local level.

If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.

Congratulations to all of the International Award for Excellence finalists:

Trillions

This is a short film (a fast paced preview of a larger effort) by MAYA Design created to put some perspective on the invisible but fast approaching challenges and opportunities in the pervasive computing age.

Please visit this link for more information.

Really interested in the implications of a trillion-node world? Read Dr. Peter Lucas’s seminal white paper that not only predicted this sort of scaling and complexity but outlined some of the resilient patterns that we need to follow to get there from here.

CNN

For two weeks the National Mall in Washington D.C. has been transformed into a boulevard of homes of the future.

The solar-powered houses are the work of university teams from across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Germany and Spain, all taking part in the Solar Decathlon. The aim: to design, build and operate the best energy-efficient solar houses. Most teams have spent at least two years working on their projects.

Preet Anand, a senior at Santa Clara University and member of Team California, told CNN about the build-up to the event:

“Our team is the only undergraduate-led team in the entire competition. We’ve built our homes on our home campus and then transported it to the National Mall in D.C., where it was reassembled over five days.

More…

A piece by Lev Bratishenko from triplecanopy:

The Roma build their palaces just like the rest of us, one cinder block at a time…

TIMOSORA, ROMANIA – Like Saint Petersburg before she was operated on for her three-hundredth, the brie-colored streets and decaying facades have a dusty continuity. Against this backdrop, the Roma build their Disneyland.

Forced by the Communists to settle in the ’60s, they have embraced a style of permanent renovation. Their mansions, in primary colors, stick like fingers in the dead dictator’s eye. But this provokes nothing beyond tourists snapping photos and locals shaking their heads.

“How do you think they pay for them?” they ask me and then spit.

More…

An essay by Richard Powers at Granta…

You’ll have heard how the city once ended in fire, and around these parts, it threatens to end in ice every few years or so. But once, not too long ago, Chicago flirted with ending in water, an entirely preventable man-made inundation that few saw but everybody felt – a two-billion-dollar sucker-punch tsunami that weighed in among the dozenmost costly floods in American history.

The groundwork for the Great Flood of 1992 was laid a century before, when the Illinois (later Chicago)Tunnel Company built a series of semi-official, semi-clandestine tunnels under almost every street downtown. The tunnels were only supposed to house telephone cables, but in a nice Pynchonian twist, the operators covertly decided to install a narrow-gauge railway for delivering freight, as well. The dirt hauled out of the tunnels filled in the lakefront and formed all the land now under Grant Park, the Field Museum, Soldier Field and McCormick Place. You’d think that amount of landfill ought to have tipped off more than a few officials that something besides phone cables was going in underground. More…

The Associate Editors listing for Volume 3 of Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal is now available.