The Forming of Design Things: Reconciling openness with the urge for completion

Abstract

The article introduces my PhD project Rehearsing and Forming the Future with attention on notions of form and completion. Designers of today have entered many fields and new disciplines have emerged such as design anthropology, service design and social design. The designer is often co-designing in interdisciplinary constellations. My interest concerns the role of the designer, her skills, tools and processes when co-visualising, co-forming and co-representing these intangible design outcomes in co-design. I ask questions like: How to apply the designer’s classical toolbox within co-design to engage stakeholders as actors? How can the co-design process be recognized as drama? How do designers, design for and form completion? How can the process of giving form be a participatory act? How can well known design-tools, play a role as props earlier and for longer parts of the processes of knowledge production? Can the notion of form raise the awareness of completion? In short: exploring the designers’ role when designing the openness of evocative design while striving for collective completion when forming design Things. It raises the tension of reconciling the openness in co-design with the urge for completion of classical design training.