A perspective on 21st design challenges facing the urgency of solutions for global sustainability

Abstract

Before the accelerated transformation of reality, we question the human role in the technological context, placing the need of thinking about the importance of intrinsically human competences. In the scope of design, a field of practice and academic discipline, the challenge for the profession and the future education is huge. Above all, these challenges have to do with large scale and with processes requiring the ability to deal with more complex conceptual frameworks, with a set of context dimensions involving economic, ecological, social, cultural, and political issues of societies in permanent change. The design community recognizes the value of designer's multidisciplinary skills and the ability to lead processes involving large socio-technical systems. However, today the designer faces the challenge of multidisciplinary working teams where skills go far beyond their traditional abilities. The thinking and practice of design reveals a set of core values ​​and virtues of the designers that allows a strategic positioning of these professionals in the complex problem-solving context. Nevertheless, designers will have an increasingly demanding role in creating products, services and experiences which mean a profession under pressure to evolve towards a more complex activity requiring new general and specialized skills. The objective of our reflection is about designer’s competencies transition demand, an imperative requiring technological and management skills and leadership capacity on sustainable solutions complex processes. Despite this recognition, designers must be prepared about collaboration and cooperation skills, a necessity more and more in tension with a reality where the whole potential of design to deal with complexity remains unaware. Design community reflects about designer’s strategic value for facing global challenges and points out the complexity approach as a requirement of design education in the future. Considered a condition for design expansion this concern is also revealed in design education research contributions. This contextual disposition makes possible to regard an alignment about a direction to pursue. This paper presents a reflection about this problematic field which intends to be a contribution to understand how design discipline can evolve meeting the designer’s community recognition of the necessity of a set of updated critical dimensions for design activity. This reflection looks at the design community before a strong demand for an evolution, pushing to a design education deep transformation. This kind of evolution for design may occur first in the professional practice and will be primarily caused, in our perspective, by the desirable and the unavoidable impact on design processes of a design community's new mindset about core principles.