Designer’s Toolkit 2020: a Vision for the Practice

Designer’s toolkit is rapidly changing and design practices need a shared vision of what the short, medium and long term might be. With this in mind we interviewed twenty-four thought leaders in the design community worldwide. Four big ideas emerged from the interviews: transferring technologies from other industries has provided great benefits, but it has also generated the need to transfer processes; changes in the way we build drives changes in the designer’s desktop, including the representations that designers use to communicate; greater gains are achieved by focussing on the interplay of specialised algorithms; “just on time” design data improves design. Four possible contexts for the designer’s toolkit are described: the proprietor aimed at increasing productivity, the open-source aimed at increasing IT driven creativity, either more or less engaged with fabrication. Finally, the paper concludes by proposing what designers ought to be doing today. Actions include educating specialist toolmakers, custodian and math modellers; integrating computer controlled machine workshops into designers’ project spaces; the automation of repetitive design tasks; supporting communities around software tools and store project data according to geospatial co-ordinates.