HCI 2004 Keynote

Design: the new rules of the game

Kees Dorst

We live in an interesting age. Technical developments and cultural, social and economic changes fundamentally reshape our societies. The role of design in the future society is transforming into something that is very different from what it was just a couple of years ago.

We have already moved immeasurably far away from a 20th Century that was dominated by the war of the grand ideologies, and find ourselves living in an age of post-modern, post-functionalism, post-everything. The design profession has found a new freedom that is both exciting and deeply confusing. The rules of the game of design are changing while we are playing it.

In this presentation the speaker will identify some developments and trends that are now shaping the character of design in the 21st Century, and speculate on the new roles that designers will find themselves in. These new roles will deeply influence the very nature of the design profession.

Kees Dorst was trained as an Industrial Design Engineer at Delft University of Technology, and studied some philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since obtaining his Master's degree in 1989 he has worked as a product designer for various design firms, participating in about fifty projects. At the same time he worked as a researcher in Design Studies at the TU Delft. In his thesis 'Describing Design? A Comparison of Paradigms' (1997, Cum Laude) he compared two fundamentally different ways of describing design processes: Rational Problem Solving and Reflective Practice. He has lectured at various universities and design schools throughout the world.
Currently, Kees Dorst works as a Senior Researcher at the faculty of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University, and he is the editor for product design of the Dutch design journal ITEMS. He also teaches design methods at the Design Academy Eindhoven and at various management institutes in The Netherlands, and works as a consultant to the Dutch governement, setting up an Institute for Postacademic Design Education. He has published numerous articles and four books. The address at the HCI conference will be partly based on his latest book, 'Understanding Design'.