85701 Research Based Design WEEK 3 FUTURE CITIES

This week’s blog entry will discuss Dan Hill’s fascinating lecture on future cities. Dan opened the lecture by echoing Kees Dorst’s ideas of strategic design, emphasizing that design today is not about solving a problem, but rather, it is about figuring out and posing the right question to be addressed.

Dan presented a unique way of seeing design, separating and breaking down the act of designing into distinct and sequential sections.

1.              UNDERSTANDING. It is of utmost importance to collect as much information as possible, analyzing and compiling data and ‘making the invisible visible’. This approach will give the designer a basis for making decisions, as well as information to then feed back to the community.

2.              STRATEGY. Secondly, design for the city encompasses ‘sensing’ the city – understanding spaces and information gathered in order to propose ways to use it to update existing structures and create new concepts which offer unique, new solutions.

3.              BEHAVIOUR. Finally, it is important to not only collect and analyse data, but to log and process human behaviour, enabling the designer to create products or structures that will change ways of thinking and perceptions.

Using this design template, Dan highlighted the importance of data to modern cities, examining how data and the web dictate the formation of patterns and networks between structures, spaces and people. For example - taking something as mundane as an email inbox log, Dan was able to reveal and physically represent patterns and design rhythms. I think this concept of creatively illustrating seemingly banal information could be applied to site research such as investigating Foley St – perhaps providing innovative and unique jumping off points for situational design ideas.

Dan also discussed the development process of design; traditionally, after a design is produced, created and distributed, no thought is given to the life of the design – what happens after this cut off point? How is the design occupied? I find this idea fascinating – to truly design for the future, design must not simply stop at production, but instead should be an evolutionary process over the lifetime of the design.