Design Now !
Long gone are the days when design was simply a way to make things pretty and more attractive to buy. Today, design making and thinking has found its way into almost every corner of society. Products of all shapes and sizes are still being designed, but so are services, businesses, data, systems, politics, education, and futures.
Map © OpenStreetMap. Some rights reserved.
Design is a curious hybrid discipline, fusing elements as diverse as art, engineering, business, philosophy, and much more. Reflected in its double meaning as a verb (a design) and noun (to design) in the English language, it is simultaneously a solid entity and a process unfolding in time. While considerable effort has been made to wrap up and sell design as a magic formula purely capable of increasing profit, design’s ability to produce value goes way beyond this: Design, at its best, can surprise us, delight us, bring us together, shift our perspectives, provoke us, make sense of our world. Crucially, design never exists in a vacuum, but always serves someone or something. That said, designers and other stakeholders have a clear agency in the process of producing desirable change, while reflecting on what this means and for whom. Rather than making an impossible attempt of boxing in design, this one day seminar will be about the way in which design is capable of exceeding itself, expanding its boundaries into new fields, societal concerns, new technologies, as an active agent in the world.
Speakers include:
Ben Rubin (Director of The Center for Data Arts, Parsons, The New School, US)
Jouni Linkola (Head of Service Design, Elisa, FI)
Bastien Kerspern (Co-Founder, Design Friction, FR)
Kalevi “Eetu” Ekman (Design Factory Director & PDP Professor, FI)
Pirjo Kääriäinen (Designer in Residence, CHEMARTS, Aalto Uni, FI)
Tapani Vuorinen (Professor, Wood Chemistry, Aalto Uni, FI) + more, stay tuned
The seminar will be held in English and is free to attend.