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