Designing With Or Designing By?

And that involves a fundamental shift in practice, the meaning of practice, and the education of practice. Are we ready to make that change?

I'm director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the Royal College of Art, we are a mulitidisciplinary group of architects, designers, engineers and anthropologists, but a place which has a very old-style view of designing for people.

In 1955 Henry Dreyfuss wrote a famous book called “Designing for People” and he followed it up with “The Measure of Man”, and it was a top-down view of how you design for people, and that’s been the way in the production economy, I would argue for the last 55 years or 65 years. People are passive, people are test subjects and it’s all about the form-giving of the designer, their skill. They infer needs from studying users, even though the techniques for studying users, rapid ethnography and so on have got more sophisticated.

We now are thankfully moving into an era where we move from designing for people to designing with people, and Dott I think is part of that. Active co-creation, where people are active participants in the process rather than passive test subjects. Needs are translated rather than just inferred and rather than it being just about the form of the object it’s all about creating tools and processes.

The question that I want to ask you is can we make the next step, and what does that mean for authorship for designers? Can we go from designing for people, the traditional view, through designing with people, the emerging practice, towards designing by people.

Think back to Walter Seagull and his self-build houses, allowing people to make their own choices. A lot of people, including some researchers in my area, are designing participatory games especially in the built environment – and I must say that I violently agreed with Nabeel Hamdi on his first assumption about the changing scope of design practice, I thought that was brilliantly put.

If we move to designing by people, in which we are not inferring needs or translating needs, but where people are having their own self recognized needs, what it means for the designers is that they are creating a platform and a vision, not even tools and processes or finished objects. And that involves a fundamental shift in practice, the meaning of practice, and the education of practice. Are we ready to make that change?

Jeremy holds the Helen Hamlyn Chair of Design at the Royal College of Art, where he is Director of the College’s world-renowned Helen Hamlyn Centre. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, he developed his interest in design and innovation as a journalist and editor working on a number of titles including Design, Creative Review and World Architecture. From 1986-89, he was Founding Editor of Design Week. Jeremy is the author of many books on design, business and society and led a number of research projects. He has curated many national exhibitions and has consulted internationally with a number of business and government organisations.