The extension and democratization of the design process

Abstract

This paper argues that outreach is a crucial tool for democratizing the design process undertaken by Industrial Design students, as this activity often remains limited to very few isolated actors within the classroom, removed from the context that gives rise to the design need. While designers aim to provide solutions to problems, these solutions should not be conceptualized independently of the surrounding context or the people involved. Outreach activities facilitate the opening of the design process, since the teaching of industrial design is based on a straightforward principle: the simulation of professional practice. Yet, within the educational environment, what frequently occurs is a form of confinement, first within a course, then within the workshop, and ultimately within the teacher-student dynamic. These successive spheres prevent students from recognizing the diverse variables present in a real-life scenario, where the discipline can play an important role. This distance between the real-world setting and the project development space poses multiple challenges. The first one is to able to imagine what is happening in a situated manner, since any activity —no matter how simple— involves multiple interdependent variables that form a complex system requiring study and understanding. Working effectively with a complex system is practically impossible from the distance of a classroom.