Research must form a core part of our practice.

We use the design process as research, where projects develop deep understanding of the contexts we work in - this includes the needs, values and practices of people, the workings of systems and the influence of the built environment. This knowledge can play its own role in supporting change and is valuable in extending impact beyond the scope of individual projects.

We also do research on Design, which looks to understand how the design works at the turning point, what methods can support people to explore new futures and build the tools needed to generate momentum.

Recommended Reading

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Towards Humane Prisons BY INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS

The design of any building profoundly affects how we feel and act within it. This is especially true of places of detention: people deprived of their liberty, sometimes for lengthy periods, have no control over their daily lives. Moreover, prison staff fulfil a vital public service and deserve to work in a safe and healthy environment.

This publication provides guiding principles on prison planning and design. These principles are derived from the International Committee of the Red Cross’s extensive experience of visiting detention places around the world and aim to address the shortcomings it has sometimes observed when countries build new prisons. It is hoped that the guiding principles will help to inform structured and inclusive decision-making to ensure decent living and working conditions in the prisons that are ultimately built.

The book is intended for national detention authorities and others with an interest in this domain, including international donors and advisers.

Designing for the Common Good by Kees Dorst & contributing authors

Our societies are becoming more complex, dynamic, and networked every day. Public organizations and companies alike are learning the hard way that the societal challenges before us cannot be resolved as they were in the past. We need new approaches to these problems.

Over the past ten years, an increasing number of government organisations, companies, and individuals have realised that special practices from design can help us rise to the challenge. At the core of this book are twenty case studies from around the world that demonstrate how design approaches can be used for societal change. These extensive case descriptions are interspersed with reflections, lessons learned, and tricks and tips for the practitioner, culminating in a vision of how design can revolutionise society.

Frame Innovation by Kees Dorst

How organisations can use practices developed by expert designers to solve today's open, complex, dynamic, and networked problems.

When organisations apply old methods of problem-solving to new kinds of problems, they may accomplish only temporary fixes or some ineffectual tinkering around the edges. Today's problems are a new breed—open, complex, dynamic, and networked—and require a radically different response. In this book, Kees Dorst describes a new, innovation-centred approach to problem-solving in organisations: frame creation. It applies “design thinking,” but it goes beyond the borrowed tricks and techniques that usually characterise that term. Frame creation focuses not on the generation of solutions but on the ability to create new approaches to the problem situation itself.

Understanding Design by Kees Dorst

What does it mean to be a designer, and what does it take to be a good designer? Understanding Design stimulates designers to think about what they do, how they do it, and why they aim for a certain effect. One hundred seventy precisely formulated mini-essays give insight into the design process and encourage reflection.

Most Recent Articles

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reasoning, framing, problem solving, design practice

The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application

reasoning, framing, problem solving, design practice

In the last few years, “Design Thinking” has gained popularity – it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far a field as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key questions: “What is the core of Design Thinking?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organisations in other fields?”. We sketch a partial answer by considering the fundamental reasoning pattern behind design, and then looking at the core design practices of framing and frame creation. The paper ends with an exploration of the way in which these core design practices can be adopted for organisational problem solving and innovation.

reasoning, framing, problem solving, design practice

design practices, frame creation, design profession, design discourse

Frame Creation & Design in the Expanded Field

design practices, frame creation, design profession, design discourse

Design-trained people have access to a very broad range of professions. Yet there is something paradoxical about this development: ostensibly, many of these highly successful people have moved out of the field of “design.” This phenomenon deserves deeper consideration: how do design practices spread across society? What key design practices are particularly relevant to the problems of today’s society? Should what these people do still be considered design? To answer these questions, first we need to understand various ways that practices can be adopted and adapted from one discipline to the other. Problem framing emerges as a key design practice that can be adopted and adapted to other fields, and one which provides a valuable alternative to conventional types of problem solving. An example will illustrate how this frame creation allows practitioners to approach today’s open, complex, dynamic, networked problems in new and fruitful ways. The paper goes on to argue that the practice of frame creation is still part and parcel of the domain of design, and explores how design can develop into an expanded field of practice.

design practices, frame creation, design profession, design discourse

design studies, design processes, abstraction behaviour

The art of ‘stepping back’: Studying levels of abstraction in a diverse design team

design studies, design processes, abstraction behaviour

A review of literature that examines how expert designers move from very concrete adoptions/amalgamations of obvious existing concepts towards highly abstract shifts to new paradigms of solutions. In this paper we investigated IF and HOW a mixed group of undergraduate and Post-graduate students from diverse backgrounds could demonstrate a similar capacity to collectively display such a movement between levels of abstraction. Essentially, the design team drew from their experiential knowledge, not moving far beyond the combinatorial solution propositions that would characterise a novice designer. More detailed research into the abstraction behaviour of novice and expert designers should inform the creation of methods and tools to assist multidisciplinary teams in moving through various levels of abstraction during the design process.

design studies, design processes, abstraction behaviour