LINKING TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN — A NEW PERSPECTIVE
The word design can mean different things to different people. Often it’s associated with how things look. Often it’s used as a noun, as in “that’s a good design!” But actually, it’s a verb. It’s not a it, it’s a how. It’s the way of doing things, it’s the way of thinking and above all, it’s the way of thinking creatively.
Design and technology, in all their various forms and disciplines, are fundamentally about converting ideas and raw materials into products and services that we all need and use on a daily basis. Everything around us has been designed; from the user interface of our latest digital app to the car we drive, the clothes we wear, the buildings we visit or live or work in, the TV programs we watch, even the perfumes we use. They’ve all been designed or been made.
Integrating Design and technology is our future. In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, Design and Technology is introduced to learners at a very early stage, as a part of the students’ curriculum itself. Introducing this at a primary level, through to the university level, provides students with opportunities to explore ideas and to design and make things that help in solving problems. Doing this will help them learn how to use tools and equipments to create designs and to work with a wide range of materials. Integrating design and technology would help in bringing different subjects like mathematics and science together, get creative with their knowledge and bring ideas to real life. Team work, resourcefulness and risk-taking are developed along the process of working with real world problems through creative and design thinking, along with technical skills.
Linking design and technology would mean being creative and solving problems in different ways and ultimately taking risks and not being afraid of getting things wrong. It helps in molding the way a person would think, which would later be very helpful for sectors like product interiors and the digital market. Even management studies have always stressed the importance of adjusting between design section and the other functional sections in product development, to achieve qualified products. Innovative product design can be integrated with Research & Development (R&D).
Today, at nearly every tech company, demand for design is through the roof. Currently, in the creative industries, like design and manufacturing, there simply are not enough people. So anybody, at the moment, getting into this industry involving the combination of design and technology, is going have a myriad of choices for their career. In the future, the average ratio of designers to engineers within a company will be something more like 1:4 rather than 1:8 or 1:10 as forward-looking design becomes more critical and teams require greater multidisciplinary and specialized skills. Design and technology is a rigorous and challenging domain which builds a bridge between academic domain and its usefulness, relevance and application to the world. AI and machine learning will have a democratizing effect on creativity, allowing more casual creatives to produce good-looking results. A latest study states “Creative pros will be enabled to continue to evolve — to new and more complex creative disciplines like 3D and immersive design, and to make new breakthroughs in original, disruptive thinking.”
You see things and you say why, but a designer dreams of things that never were and says why not. We need the next generation of young designers, engineers and technologists to constantly ask the question why not, to think differently and to find solutions to problems, to create a better future, a future that is better by design.
