Why Design is Conversation and Why Conversation for Every Design
I believe that by bringing together design and science we can produce a rigorous but flexible approach that will allow us to explore, understand and contribute to science in an antidisciplinary way. — Joi Ito
Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, is starting a new journal with MIT Press and MIT Libraries called Design and Science. His introductory post takes the stand that science suffers from narrow vocabularies that create silos of thinking and restrict rich collaboration.
The paper “Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action” [PDF] has recently gone to print in a peer-reviewed journal. It offers a rationale for the position that design is conversation; perhaps a surprising idea, but the logic in the paper is rigorous. Cybernetics offers a foundation for 21st-century design practice, here is the core of it:
Given vast changes in society and technology in the past 50 years, what will designers do differently today?
My talk at the MWUX Conference, Pittsburgh, October 2015 was an opportunity to present a proposal with rationale for the “literacies” that are required by IxD practitioners: