YOU ARE IN MY SYSTEM
DESIGN RESEARCH COURSE ON PREFERRED INTERCONNECTED/ SMART FUTURES
partners; Design Academy Eindhoven (Bas Raijmakers, Mike Thompson, Danielle Arets, Isabelle Makay), Mozilla Foundation (John Rogers, Julia Kloiber), STBY (Bas Raijmakers), Quicksand (Babitha George), Utrecht University (Albert Meijer, Lucky Belder), SETUP (Frank Jan van Lunteren, Jelle van der Ster)
The Knowledge Institute for Mobility recently predicted that the Netherlands will face traffic chaos in 2020. A ballooning population, combined with a trend towards more nomadic life styles, flexible approaches to work and a growing economy, will result in an over demand in public transport. A few short years from now we will be forced to make a radical transition from traditional energy sources such as oil and gas to alternative, green energy production. A multi-layered approach is needed, where not only novel, complex energy systems are designed, but new social policies and practices including are adopted to support this transformation. Furthermore, The World Economic Forum, expect robots, in the realm of 3-D printing, biotech and nanotechnology to replace over 5 million human jobs by 2020, in what is dubbed the "Fourth Industrial Revolution.
And yet, in countries such as India, human driven systems of mind-boggling scale and precision demonstrate that technology need not permeate every aspect of our lives. For example, in Mumbai, some 200,000 home-cooked meals are transported daily with 5000 dabbawala’s (meaning “one who carries a box”) responsible for weaving their way through the metropolises complex network of railways trains and bicycles, delivering hot food directly from workers door to work and back again. Considering such examples, how might we as designers operate within complex systems to design meaningful human centered experiences?
In the design research minor course 'You are in my system' we embark on a design research journey focused on system design. From the off, students will be introduced to a variety of design research methodologies and tools including ethnographic, visual analyses, documentary research, critical research and futuring. An critical aspect of this research is an international fieldtrip to Bengalore in India
With its large population and enormous socio-cultural-economic-environmental diversity, India has been carefully chosen as microcosm for the world. Many of the challenges the world faces today, are present and amplified in India, yet thanks to their culture of ingenuity and resourcefulness, they are well equipped to not only respond to these challenges, while acknowledging the importance of the human. What can highly complex, technology driven systems in the Netherlands learn from observing human driven systems in Mumbai? How might we reconfigure technological systems to bring back the human to reflect upon and tackle technological limitations?
The design challenge for students in this course – based on the observations and insights from research Netherlands and India – is to completely reimagine complex systems developing their own visions for a preferred future. Furthermore, we ask students to systematically reflect on all the research steps taken, documenting your progress via blogging, video mapping or audio. This ‘trail of evidence’ is seen an integral part of your final design proposal. As a final outcome, to showcase your research, students and tutors together will create a documentary.