Paul A. Rodgers

The Covid-19 crisis and the designed interventions that the authors have catalogued in this book prove definitively that design does care. The authors documented this as it evolved every day from the 1st January 2020 to 31st May 2020 inclusive. Then they looked at all of this care and caring from the point of view of design and, by the sheer volume of design interventions they have documented, illustrate that design is good in a crisis. What the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated is that for the first time in modern history, capital was totally irrelevant. Money could not save your life. Only design could. Rapidly designed masks, shelters, hospitals, instructional posters, infographics, dashboards, respirators, sanitisers, virtual and local communities emerged to save us. From January 2020, design became king. The Covid-19 global pandemic presented an ontological reality; design is more than margins or profit. In fact, design became extremely valuable when it stopped concentrating on those things and started to care about peoples’ lives. This brief episode in history is still repositioning the status of design and reconfiguring its signifier from consumption to care. The contents of this book cover the outbreak, lockdown, and the beginning of the reopening in the UK. In between, the book functions as a history of pandemic crisis design interventions. As such it is a “research-in-the-moment project” where we have illustrated our thoughts and insights in tables, charts and diagrams. We have accepted all design interventions as valid and given them the same role and status by presenting each of them in a standard format. No curation. No selection. No position. The task of critical analysis must follow – perhaps by us, certainly by others.

The Covid-19 crisis and the designed interventions that the authors have catalogued in this book prove definitively that design does care. The authors documented this as it evolved every day from the 1st January 2020 to 31st May 2020 inclusive. Then they looked at all of this care and caring from the point of view of design and, by the sheer volume of design interventions they have documented, illustrate that design is good in a crisis. What the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated is that for the first time in modern history, capital was totally irrelevant. Money could not save your life. Only design could. Rapidly designed masks, shelters, hospitals, instructional posters, infographics, dashboards, respirators, sanitisers, virtual and local communities emerged to save us. From January 2020, design became king. The Covid-19 global pandemic presented an ontological reality; design is more than margins or profit. In fact, design became extremely valuable when it stopped concentrating on those things and started to care about peoples’ lives. This brief episode in history is still repositioning the status of design and reconfiguring its signifier from consumption to care. The contents of this book cover the outbreak, lockdown, and the beginning of the reopening in the UK. In between, the book functions as a history of pandemic crisis design interventions. As such it is a “research-in-the-moment project” where we have illustrated our thoughts and insights in tables, charts and diagrams. We have accepted all design interventions as valid and given them the same role and status by presenting each of them in a standard format. No curation. No selection. No position. The task of critical analysis must follow – perhaps by us, certainly by others.

Theories normally seek to explain something. 118 Theories of Design[ing] asks us to question those explanations. By focusing on a broad range of somewhat overlooked and undervalued essays, papers, book articles, words, terms, authors and phenomena that swirl around design[ing], the reader is encouraged to read, reflect and question everything. This original book will appeal to a global market of university faculty heads and deans, museum directors, design educators, design researchers, key design practitioners, publishers, members of the design media, and undergraduate, postgraduate and post-doctoral students of design.

By examining the contemporary situation of the Design School from a global perspective, this book explores how the structure of design learning and teaching, research and practice, is being transformed by a number of internal, external, and contextual factors and the implications of these factors for future iterations of the Design School. Exploring contemporary design education, this book asks whether Design Schools are shaping a new type of designer, or if tomorrow’s designers will emerge from other professions such as business, health care, education, and computing, where design ‘thinking’ is now regularly applied. The book is proposed at a time when governments and markets across the world are reshaping education. In a time of rapid and intensive change, it looks internationally at the shape of the Design School of the future. The book has been developed from a series of summits that explored the future of the contemporary Design School informed by international perspectives from high level invited speakers from design education, culture and industry who were asked: * How can a Design School in the age of the Anthropocene best prepare future designers for this complex world? * How can the Design School maximize the potential opportunities suggested by this future, uncertain world at a time of rapid and intensive change? * Having changed the planet how should the Design School react to the planet changing us? The three summits reflect three significant turns in the contemporary Design School. The first focused on the current issues surrounding the Design School from the academic perspective. The second summit examined the increasingly intensive relationship between industry and Design Schools. The third summit focused on the increasingly close relationship between the Design School and the Cultural Sector. The book includes essays from the expanding landscape of the Design School, including educational providers, the design museum sector, the international design festival circuit and influential practitioners engaged in design education. The essays in this book provide a valuable, comprehensive examination of the future of the Design School and render a unique forecast of its probable trajectory.