A Changing World
From what I understood of Stefan Hajkowicz' lecture, the future of design itself seems to depend on knowledge about our world and its future. Especially in what seem to be increasingly volatile circumstances relating to both situations mostly within human control (conflict and economic depression) and mostly outside of our control (climate change), there is an ever increasing demand for understanding and prediction. Furthermore he spoke about 'megatrends', a term given to streams of action, thought and issues most important to today's civilisation. The trends the CSIRO had come up with are grouped within the following:
- limited resources
- digital vs natural
- personalisation of products & services
- urbanising & increased mobility
- divergent demographies
It struck me as interesting that, unknowingly, most of these trends have been covered in the projects done by our class. My group, Unmasked is definitely focusing on divergent demographies - as I've mentioned before our project is largely based on finding the individuality hidden in several target groups of people. Bottled up and Taking the Piss is looking at the opinion of individual people and Traces Of Darlo is focusing on individual experiences through photography. The furniture group are concerned with personalising products discarded by the greater community (which also creates a cradle-to-cradle* phenomenon) and is related to the idea of limited resources. And Grassroots is all about promoting greener urban spaces.
Perhaps there's something in this megatrends idea?
*McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael 2002, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, North Point Press, New York
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