How can we join together what industry separates?

Compatibility or incompatibility between systems, products and technologies is also designed. Standard models can put up walls, but they can also open the door to collaboration.

Design produces and reproduces standard models, in other words, patterns of use, operation and compatibility between brands, systems or products. Some of these standard models build bridges to allow different formats to function in conjunction with one another, while others look to do the opposite and create barriers. An example of this are Android and Apple phone chargers, which are not compatible between the brands. These deliberate incompatibilities look to include or exclude markets and users. This is where the politics of design is most evident.

In counterpoint to both this and the laws regulating intellectual property, DIY and free culture movements exploit the ease with which digital files can be circulated, copied and modified to promote a collective intelligence which positively rethinks and reconstructs the products that surround us.

Do all cultures consume in the same way?

Global products often have a single design for a range of different users. Eventually, people will learn to adapt this design to satisfy their own needs.

Tool design is based on a series of preconceptions regarding how the tools will be used and for what purpose. This, therefore, implies a series of particular values and ways of understanding humans, work, relationships and creativity. In other words, a design is never neutral. While objects are designed with a particular use in mind, their eventual use will depend on each user.

Design, therefore, is a space for negotiation – sometimes more akin to a battleground – between companies, technical possibilities, desires, interests or ideologies. An object or service’s possible uses are flexible, often beyond the intentions of the designer.

Can we design what we cannot see?

In a reality that evolves and changes at a dizzying pace, science and design are being asked to understand one another and even to converge.

Traditionally, disciplines like the arts, natural sciences, design or social sciences, have been perceived as belonging to separate fields. Science and design have different aims, practices and research methodologies. Science is capable of generating rigorous and significant knowledge, while design attempts to modify the world around us.

By creating spaces that bring the disciplines together, science can help design to find new interpretive frameworks, and design, as an applied tool capable of measuring and translating different forms of knowledge and practice, can generate positive ways of understanding and intervening in reality. Design and science can work together to improve people’s lives.

Can design pose moral challenges?

Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, create spaces which blur the line between fiction and reality. This is where design can explore situations that are yet to happen.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote addressed the idea that fiction could drive a person insane. More than four hundred years later, the Internet and video games, and other media, continue to defy the limits between fiction and reality.

Throughout history we have endeavoured to destroy the membrane that separates what we believe is real from what we consider to be fantasy, and the recent advances in virtual reality have made great strides in this direction. The power this technology wields, thanks to its immersive capacity, when it comes to generating alternative realities provides a breeding ground for experimenting with new limits of behaviour which do not necessarily respond to the restrictions of the real world or the laws (whether physical, relational or criminal) that this imposes upon us.

Where do things come from?

The objects and products that surround us have a history. Design, as a space for research, can be used to reconstruct that history.

The services and products that we consume on a daily basis are composed of a multitude of elements and, before reaching us, undergo a series of different processes. Most of the time, uncovering their traceability is an arduous, if not impossible, task, partly because of the opacity of the processes themselves but also due to the enormous complexity entailed by any product of mass consumption.

Just as forensic science serves as an instrument to resolve crimes by reconstructing their history through physical clues, design can, beyond producing objects and driving processes, act as a research space to help us to understand how something is made, exposing the reality hidden within the objects themselves or revealing how we are using our planet’s resources.

Design can thereby serve to make industrial processes more transparent and help us to better understand the origins of what we consume.

Do brands want to adapt to new business models?

In the information era, people look for goods and services that are increasingly adapted to meet our needs. Industry 4.0, thanks to new technologies, is capable of making this a reality.

The mass production that resulted from the industrial revolution in the 19th century provided a limited range of products. In the two final decades of the 20th century, the market demanded greater product personalisation, more in line with different sectors of the population. With the advent of the Internet and personalised recommendations came the on-demand economy, in which each individuals seek to satisfy their ever more specific consumer preferences.

In response to these ultra-specialised demands, and thanks to the technical capacities of 3D printing or the automation of processes of organisation, production and distribution, came the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0, which brings the cultural and consumption needs arising from the digital world to industrial-scale production.

How can we feed 10 billion people?

Our current food system is highly polluting. Design can help to reduce its impact, while at the same time improving food quality.

The environmental crisis we are faced with today has led various stakeholders from the food production chain to take action. With the intention of reducing environmental impact while at the same time increasing efficiency, these actors are experimenting with alternatives to pesticides, extensive farming, animal cruelty or the staggering distances that separate food production and consumption.

In this arena, biology, agriculture, livestock farming, transport, engineering and communications all interrelate in an attempt to decode the current food system, on both a microscopic and global scale, and to design new and more sustainable models which improve conditions for us and our environment.

Who controls who?

Behaviour and perception can also be designed. This is not only design’s great power, but also its great responsibility.

We don’t interact in the same way with a door fitted with a metal plate than if it has a doorknob. A doorknob can tell us to “pull” or “push”. The metal plate only allows us to push.  Design creates, modifies and determines behaviour, making certain actions possible or impossible. On Facebook, for example, we can click on “like” but do not have the option to “not like”. These increasingly conscious decisions are aimed at favouring certain behavioural patterns over others and can be seen in all kinds of environments.

The field of experience design seeks to understand, drive and modulate the sensations experienced and actions undertaken by users or clients of a product or service. Here, design can be seen to wield great power, which comes, as Roosevelt once told the American people, with great responsibility.

How can a material change our lives?

The constant revolution of materials used by humans as tools has a new milestone in its history: graphene.

Our civilisation cannot be understood without a knowledge of how people have employed the materials that surround us. We have been using silicon, for example, since the dawn of humanity. One thousand five hundred years ago, our ancestors used dry lava to build sharp tools. The early Mesopotamian civilisations learned to use silicon to make glass and, therefore, windows and bottles. Likewise, today, the so-called digital revolution would not have been possible without silicon’s properties as a semiconductor, an essential element for all electronic devices to work properly.

Like silicon, graphene is being hailed as a revolutionary material.The difference is that it was obtained in 2010. Its possibilities, like silicon just forty years ago, are unimaginable today.

Should we allow everything to be automated?

In autonomous systems capable of taking important decisions, design does not just respond to forms and processes, but also to ethical concerns.

The idea of the autonomous machine (robots, drones, automatic cars) has been fuelling technological progress for centuries. Today, this dream is becoming a reality, and with the promise of comfort and efficiency come a series of dangers that should be addressed by design. When we delegate to a machine, this will take certain decisions on our behalf. But, who defines the criteria by which these decisions are made? Take self-driving cars, for example. Should they run over a pedestrian or kill their driver in the event of a possible collision? When faced with the decision, should they allow a crash causing costly damages or run over a dog?

These questions lead to another broader and perhaps more pressing issue: Can ethics be designed?

And if so, who should do it and how?

Where is the boundary between the artificial and the natural?

Engineering nature implies using the properties of natural elements to explore new materials and applications.

Humans are not the only living beings that build spaces in which we live, work, relate to one another and which protect us. Ants, bees, silkworms, and birds develop materials and forms of construction which are similar to those of people.

In fact, we have used some of their materials -such as beeswax or the silk produced by worms- to create new objects. Spaces have therefore arisen where humans have exploited or collaborated with these animals, whose intelligences and capacities when it comes to engineering and design are a model to follow.

In a context of environmental collapse design can open a space for dialogue between humans and other living beings, which blurs the line between the concepts of “wild” and “domestic”, constructing ways of relating and living with one another that are more enriching and respectful between species.

Where do data come from?

Open-source design is a philosophy that allows citizens to generate their own tools based on their individual needs.

Many of the devices we interact with on a daily basis work like a black box. A tablet, for example, reacts to our touch, but for most people the process that makes this possible is a mystery. There are other systems, such as Arduino for example, which are designed to be intervened in, expanded and used creatively by anyone who wants to. These kinds of technologies have been designed to be highly flexible, allowing them to provide solutions to a multitude of problems.

Using the open code concept, designers, engineers, town planners or citizens employ already existing tools to better understand and transform their environment. Here, design is at the service of social needs, creating alternatives for and with those who are affected, based on their specific needs, and generating spaces for learning and integrative creativity. New spaces are thereby opened for political and citizen participation, and to allow these actors to have an impact on the cities where they live.

New challenges require new solutions. In a context in which creativity is fundamental for the future, the ability to measure and apply this skill becomes yet another tool.

We live in a context of constant change in which there is a need for a great capacity to adapt. Creativity is a highly useful tool when it comes to generating new viewpoints and ways of working, and not just in the design sector, but also in business, management, logistics, mobility or politics.

Just as there are methods for identifying leadership or organisational capacities, there is also a need for systems to map and measure creative skills. This will give organisations the capacity to better understand their way of integrating and working with creativity, analysing their own strengths and weaknesses, and incorporating profiles capable of contributing where necessary in the design process.

Here, research in design can help to make visible what was previously considered imperceptible, and thus use it as a tool to improve work processes and results.