After completing my bachelor's degree in graphic design and transitioning into a career in interaction design, I chose to take a sabbatical. I relocated to a new country to pursue a two-year, full-time master’s program in Information Design. However, I soon felt that the critical design ethos of the school was becoming increasingly disconnected from industry realities. To bridge this gap, I started working part-time as a UX designer while continuing my studies. As my classmates and colleagues confidently identified as designers and asserted they were engaging in 'good' design, I found myself feeling disillusioned by the contrasting values and approaches within these different design disciplines.
Course
MA Information Design
Design Academy Eindhoven
Tutors
Joost Grootens
Marco Ferrari
Geert Staal
Simon Davies
Irene Stracuzzi
Challenge
As design evolves, new sub-disciplines emerge, each with distinct contexts, values, and methodologies. While this evolution allows designers to shape their work and identities, it complicates communication and collaboration among diverse design communities. For instance, the human-centered and critical design communities, rooted in corporate and academic settings respectively, often lack connection despite their shared histories and principles. The challenge is to encourage these disciplines to recognize their common goals and collaborative potential.
Objective
This thesis seeks to explore ways to bridge gaps between design communities, focusing specifically on human-centered and critical design. By examining their overlapping values and histories in co-creation and participatory design, I aim to identify tensions and commonalities that can foster a more intersectional design practice, promoting collaboration across disciplines for greater social impact.
Process
Alongside reflection on my personal experiences of working within both human-centered and critical design environments, I designed and conducted a year-long series of interviews with designers from different design disciplines and organised 4 co-creative workshops to bring these designers together over common and contrasting design themes.
The insights from these steps alongside historical and theoretical frameworks from co-creation and participatory design allowed me to identity key points of overlap and tension.
This process culminated in mapping potential strategies for fostering communication and collaboration across the different design disciplines.
The insights gathered from these activities, combined with historical and theoretical frameworks of co-creation and participatory design, helped identify key overlaps and tensions. This culminated in mapping potential strategies to enhance communication and collaboration among different design disciplines.