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Design Opportunity: What is it?
The questions about design, design opportunity, design context and design situation in this ongoing discussion about the design situation is something that I have been grappling with for some time now. Recently, during this month, I have had the opportunity to speak at two very different conferences about the role of design in each of these different situations. The first was at the conference in Shillong on 12th & 13th November 2005, "CII-NID Design Conclave" which focussed on development issues and the role of design in the Northeastern Region of India. The second conference was at NID, Ahmedabad on 15th & 16th November 2005 on "GeoVisualisation and Design for development". In both these presentations I tried to describe wat is a "Design Opportunity" and "What is Design" for a largely administrative audience in Shillong and a scientific and technical team of experets in Geographical modelling and IT applications at the NID, Ahmedabad meet.
I used the term "Design Opportunity" to describe the manner in which our perceptions of any potential design situation immediately creates some cognitive or emotional sense or intention which gets informed by exploration and interaction leading to design action. I have modeled this phenomenon in a diagram which looks like a ying-yang symbol with the swirls separated by a circle on the middle. Each of the swirls is labelled "problem perception" and "solution insight" respectively, while the inner circle is called design opportunity. This "eye like set of symbols is bounded by a larger circle in dotted line containing the words "Vision" (at the top) and "Context" at the bottom. Human vision interacts with the context, with imagination, to create a "design opportunity" leading to design thought (based on growing conviction) and then design action that is driven by conviction as well. So the term opportunity is not about something that you can find by chance, but it is a product of intentionality and imagination, which explains why it is so difficult to explain an emerging design opportunity till some concrete expression is achieved in the form of abstract models or at a later stage more concrete erpresentations. This verbal description of my visual models may not be the best way to describe what I have to say here.
However both these presentations can be downloaded from my web archive at my web site link below
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp>
The file names are
The Shillong presentation file: CII-NID Shillong_Show2005.pdf (6.3 MB)
The NID GeoVisualisation presentation file
<GeoVisualisation_2005_Lres.pdf> (3.4 MB)
I like the emphasis on the terms design situation and transformation situation but I continue to use the term context since, although we work in a specific situation the actions are informed by a much larger context (global concerns) and it is indeed influenced by history and by future possibility as imagined by the designer. Further there is competition in any design situation and politics of community or official decisions that adds complexity to the whole activity.
You will see in my presentations that I have also been using the terminology offered by Nelson and Stolterman in their book "The Design Way" since it is a very accesible text that brings great clarity in a space that is still underpopulated by good books on the subject. The terminology used is a sequence to describe the design way from – Intentions, Explorations, Compositions, Judgements, Action, Promotion and Nurture, as the key stages of design thought and action.
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