Future design
why we need design visions
Design is a forward oriented discipline of research, creation and iteration. But today’s world of fast food, fast fashion, fast-moving consumer goods, no time to market and quick returns of investments collides with the capacity of design to innovate and create sustainable solutions with long-term value. Whether it is a timeless chair, framing wicked problems or formulating utopias design, as a field and as a process, can tackle a wide range of challenges. And today more than ever we need solutions to some of the biggest challenges humans have ever faced. William McDonough assigned an even bigger role to designers when he wrote;
“In a very real way, designers create the human environment; they make the things we use, the places we live and work, our modes of communication and mobility. Simply put, design matters. And at a moment in our history in which the scientific community has issued serious warnings about the negative impacts of our flawed designs – from global warming and water pollution to the loss of biodiversity and natural resources – designers have a critical role to play in the creation of a more just, healthful and sustainable world.”
This quote outlines the positive impact professional creative thinking (or what designers have done for decades: design thinking) could have and in doing so implicitly frees design of its current position as an add-on-service or marketing tool.
But applying the statements paradigm to the real business world of KPIs, shareholder obligations and career ambitions it becomes clear that personal interests and ambitious profits still outweigh the benefit for the many.
design-visions is a platform for inspiring ideas, future concepts and projects beyond economic constraints.
Sustainability can be measured in environment saved over time. Because only time can tell the real sustainability, this collection is updated continuously to add new developments and information to the projects.
I believe that it is essential to formulate creative solutions to (big) wicked problems to be able to visualize desirable futures and make them tangible, relatable and rateable for all. We all have an interest in a more a sustainable, human and humane future but yet most of us (have to) serve short term business goals.
Finding business opportunities and economic white spots (new business opportunities in futures markets) is as much a skill of designers as optimizing an interface. Creativity can be useful long before the briefing is written.
“Design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them.”
The Curator
Armin Warnecke is a strategist and human-centered innovation designer from Hamburg, Germany.
After his Masters degree in Industrial- and Medical Design from the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design he went on to work at the Strategy Lab and Design Studio design for human nature in Hamburg.
During his design education and on and off the job, he developed ideas and concepts to tackle current and future challenges. Every idea was focused on improving the quality of life and based on the vision of a more sustainable future.
"Human-centered innovation design combines analytical and creative processes focused on the human experience to develop future-oriented, sustainable solutions that meet stakeholder needs while creating meaningful value for people."
What started as a pure interest evolved into an idea and the attempt to make a positive impact beyond the business world.
As the need for statements about the future grew, so did the idea of bringing the concepts more into the public eye and uniting them in a place of future visions.
This platform is that place. From creative solutions for current and future problems to desirable visions of the future, Armin curates these projects to bring people closer to the creative inventiveness of design visions and anchor them as a reference point in time.