I I would like to complement members of the DRS list on the high level
of discussions especially concerning design theories - it has been a delight
reading them.

My earlier enquiry about bringing outlying areas of designing back into
the fold originated in observing similarities and differences betweensome
of these outlier areas and more traditional designing. 

Inside myself, I find that I approach designing  policy or organisational
structures in a similar manner to designing buildings, vehicle components
or computer programs and follow similar sorts of processes, but that there
are substantial differences that extend beyond informatic content and
contextual knowledge. Is this the same for everyone? The biggest differences
between creating designs in these outlier areas and the traditional more
traditional designing of 'hardware' seems mainly to involve temporal issues.
When I design hardware, my analyses involving the future are temporarily
relatively single-pronged in a way that is pretty  exclusively to do with
the characteristics of the designed artefact. That is, I mentally test
out/research/reflect on partial design solutions in a 'design world' that
is very similar to the present. This contrasts with some of the outlier
sort of designing that depends on  temporally multi-pronged processes
in which where varous aspects of the future  contexts for the designed
artefact have also to be researched and designed. This work on researching/desi
gning future context often requires more resources and effort that the
designed object.

For example, in a recent project involving designing effective youth services
between now and 2015, the extra  temporally-based contextual issues that
needed attention involved:

1. Identifying all the significant characteristics of contemporary young
persons, eg  race, gender, urban/rural, class, wealth, parenthood, education,
age, etc
2. Identifying all the aspects of contemporary life that impact on how
young people with combinations of these characteristics need services,
eg employment, home situation, ages of access to resources, legal constraints,
social norms relating to young persons, juvenile justice issues, influential
institutions,  etc
3. Identifying those characterisitics of contemporary life and the historical
trends that are the drivers of change and are likely to provide guidance
as to the likelyhood of future contexts
4. Projecting future visions, based on these drivers of change and other
information,  of how the world might be in 2015
5. Choosing a  measure that will define three of these visions to represent
futures that are better/worse/similar to the present. Typical measures
might be: social equity, socio-legal exclusion, health, employment,or
 social justice
6. Identifying the characteristics of future contexts that are likely
to impact on particular groups of young people, especially those characteristic
s that are different from the present
7. Identifying  the impacts of the better/worse/similar  futures on particular
groups of young people via the characteristics
8. Forecasting and backcasting three pathways from the present to the
better/worse/similar futures
After the creation of the future contexts, the designing of policy pathways
for effective services was relatively straightforward. 

Two things strike me about the above process. First, the focus of designing
has moved to 'designing context' rather than 'designing artefact' Second,
the pace of recent social and technological change means that the assumptions
and underlying basis of this sort of design process are different in many
ways from 'models of design process' which might otherwise be used to
build suitable design methods for this process.

These issues, I feel, are important pointers to the future of design methods
and methodologies in traditional designing, and in this sense, some of
these outlier areas of design are acting as 'miners' canaries' for design
research. In brief, the increasing rate of social and technological change
requires us to reach further into the future when designing because the
useful life of artefacts are likely to lie in circumstances different
from the present. At the same time, the data on which we base projections
is often out of date before we receive it. Twenty years ago, data had
a life of ten or more useful years after publication, and it was possible
to use this data to project 5 years or so into the future with some confidence.
 Today, it is necessary to project further, and the pace of change is
such that much of the data cannot be confidently used for constructing
trends for more than a two or three years. Bearing in mind that a book
published today was probably delivered to the publishers last year, was
written the year before, and based on data that may be several years old
(especially census data), then a lot of the available data is already
out of date and unusable at printing time.

Present design methods, and models of design process, do not address these
issues well, and perhaps it is time to look at integrating the knowledge
of the domain of Future Studies with design theory and methodology.

I welcome your comments, advice and suggestions

Best wishes

Terry

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Dr. Terence Love
Praxis Education
21 Spiers Rd  
Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel & Fax +61 8 9305 7629
Email: [log in to unmask]
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