HCI 2004 hears the New Rules of Design

'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,' said Kees Dorst opening HCI 2004 with a keynote talk entitled "Design: the New Rules of the Game".

Combining philosophy and design research, he argued that, in the past, the disciplines were clear-cut:
* Engineering, connecting things to things
* Design, connecting people to things, and
* Social sciences, connecting people to people.

Now, he said, the challenge is to make new connections: people – things – people. Design has to reach beyond its traditional focus on functionality, to the social and cultural value of these systems.

'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,' said Dorst. Design education is not keeping up.

He told a rapt audience that styles have no real meaning any longer and that the last great movement, functionality, is also a thing of the past. 'Economic values seem dominant,' he said, explaining that the original sense of 'good design is good business' had been lost since business understood design only vaguely, but understood business all too well.

He then identified a new trend replacing functionality. The process of design is transforming from company -> designer -> user to designer -> user -> company, as designers are increasingly creating value by understanding the processes in society and taking this research to companies to use.

He concluded that 'the design of interfaces and interactions has to move beyond the ergonomics-of-use into the development of 'cultural ergonomics' and 'social ergonomics'. 'This is the core of an emerging design discipline,' he said, and those designers who insist on being "Creatives" 'are going to be the naïve ones, reduced to making furniture or something equally simple.'

Dorst has been working as senior researcher in the faculty of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University, and teaching design methods at the Design Academy, Eindhoven, and at various management institutes in The Netherlands, as well as practising in a range of international design jobs.

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