Design Metamorphosis

The posture of design has changed. The world around us is artificial. Art and design must now contribute to our re-foundation, our regeneration.

Human beings evolve at the heart of the artificial world that they continuously create, in a nature denatured by a hybridization achieved by a systematic convocation of all its resources and a romantic virtualization of its representation.

Natural resources and materials with processes and systems proven for millennia, all the scientific way of capturing our surrounding “real” world with laws of physics, biology, economics, evolution theories, simulations, all the way to bio-mimicry have been considering nature as direct inspiration to the development of the contract of the industry. 

Design as the Art applied to the industry, is an industry also. It is a creative and cultural industry. The difference, not the opposition, with science, is the way design questions the world and its attitude towards nature. "We understand by science, we become by imagination"

As a manifestation of our actions and creation, Design demands that we position ourselves more as repairers of our actions than perpetual discoverers and conquerors of existing fields. The great accelerator of our lives today is the digital revolution: on the top of the disparition of our values, we see our world disappearing

The three recognized assets of Design industry are branding (meaning and communication, narrative), concept/product/ services (I.P) and Know-how (Practice, Thinking and methods). 

Those traditional assets are being consider under the digital threat by designers and creative practionners around the lines such as: social networks rebuilding reputation without serious branding asset creation or heavily planned strategies, digital hacking and copycat of products exhausting original innovations and a lack of understanding of value of reflective thinking.

The traditional belief of creativity is being challenged with digital innovation. The creative and sophisticated CAD software’s are improving the interactions with the complexity. These solutions bring efficiency through reducing the technical constraints from ideation to production, virtual collaboration spaces offering more freedom to creators and designers to tackle new territories

It is without imagining the incredible capacities digital provides to address large interconnected and transdisciplinary program, extended scope of design research, placing designers in uncertain yet inspirational playgrounds to create and to design sensible and tangible new experiences. "My belief is that our future lies in the meeting of the two worlds: the digital world and the know-how of excellence. Digital offers to think things differently, to do new things. We must not oppose digital innovation, design practice and vernacular know-how. 

Working at the heart of the web and cloud capacities, designers are finding the right enablers at their fingertips to communicate and collaboratively built strong ecosystems without being part of an enterprise. Social networks and communities on line enhanced with the access of plethoric data are becoming spaces for experimentation grounded on territorial and social actions aligned with purposeful brand universes, offering the new face of responsible design.

Design is now the design of experiences where the patient, the customer, the user, the human is being immerge in a seductive, comfortable, meaningful journey. From the physical to the virtual back to the physical, it is a smooth continuum when avoiding frictions. It is requiring to “thinking” the experience ahead of time “experience thinking” with all its constitutive components & systems, services & stakeholders in a 360° approach. This means that an experience is not a linear process but as a web, a net of interconnected points of contacts, inferences and interactions is a multidimensional constructed narrative.

 "The possibility of virtual universes creates new material, emotional and existential experiences"

The gesture of the designer is to connect by the realization of a form (it can be the "form of an experience") a multiplicity of signs and gestures that make up our behaviors. The design of experience means the design of “living forms”. If we now consider the path where the world is aiming, well, the designers have to zoom out.

More importantly, if design is now at the forefront of designing our every living experiences that the industries will produced, the responsibility of the designer is raising high. We are designing in an incredibly fast pace and large scale, with a permanent increase of complexity: new social, economic, industrial, societal and political challenges call for more openness and a radical shift in our thinking.

Design is now thinking @large, an interconnected ecological thinking.