(VID)

– shaping digital and ethically correct spaces for creativity and its benefits to stakeholders

This chapter describes a project, first conceived in 2018, for digital and ethically correct ‘spaces for creativity’, within interactive university learning landscapes and economies. The project is continuing to evaluate the experiences gained over the past years of digitisation, thereby learning how to create future learning landscapes in design and engineering – and beyond. What do we need to shape ethically ‘correct’ compliance, within Europe and around the globe, that will help build ‘digital competencies’ for using digital tools – not only with focus on design engineering and creative industries.

6.2.1 Digital and ethically correct spaces for designing – what role does interactivity play?

The long-term project ‘Digital ethical correct design spaces in the interactive university landscape and economy’ offers an innovative learning opportunity – primarily for master students, but also others taking the module: ‘Virtual Interactive Design (VID)

– Cross-Cultural in Europe’.

The concept sketch was formulated from a design engineering perspective. Here, design drafting methods, as well as design theory models and methods, shape the basis for didactic tools used for interdisciplinary, integrated learning. In addition, ‘interactive designing’ has evolved since the 1990s and now means fewer digitally networked tools, as compared to metaphorically interactive design processes.

The innovative learning offered by ‘Virtual Interactive Design’ (VID), combines self-learning via online courses – called ‘MOOCs’ (massive open online courses) – as well as blended-learning practical courses that focus on events with the following objectives:

1.

2.

Students train how to use artificial intelligence in a reflected, ethical manner – machine-based learning.

3.

Two newly designed MOOCs impart basic knowledge of AI competence, in special subjects (e. g. history of design/technology), in order to fulfil the third objective. Here step 2. furthermore enables interdisciplinary, culturally networked interactive learning and design by means of project-related MOOCs.

In the VID project, students learn to collectively train their AI competencies at peer-level, as well as with external actors (collaborating enterprises, other experts), while using different digital teaching/learning settings. In addition, they use methods that help them reflect upon ethical usages. At the same time, these future experts have the opportunity to train their AI competencies. Ideally, these projects involve 10 to 20 participants. Theoretically it is possible to scale it up to 100 people – though it is questionable whether that is a sensible group size, especially when building ‘complex problem solving’ skills within the European region and through interactions with stakeholders from businesses, politics and research. This can be achieved through OERs (Open Educational Resources), which enable individuals to practice self-learning, self-reflection and evaluations in peer assessment procedures, which translates into lifelong learning for everyone in society. The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, in a very short space of time, what is possible from a technical point of view. However, at the same time we have to perform a precise didactic evaluation, to determine which consequences this will have for new learning – and interactive design – formats: combining the best ‘from blackboard to tablet’ in interlinked learning – in ethically correct spaces.

Marina-Elena Wachs: ‘What do we need to improve the future of design engineering education?

Ashley Hall as Professor of Design Innovation answered:

Ashley Hall

I believe we have design futures, not a single future. We have a choice and need to find better ways to arrive at those better futures. There are many ways of doing this and in design education we have a wide range of tools and methods for designing futures. These mainly fall into two groups; the first is anticipatory (Fuller, 1992), we project an imagined future then design a solution and wait for it to happen. The second is to envisage the futures we want to arrive at and proactively design for steering towards them. The first set is useful more for applied design and the second more strategic and involves working outside of traditional design relationships with industry.

This is an even more pressing issue now that we understand that design needs to develop a more proactive model for us to tackle the big global issues that are coming our way in the future. Proactive or prospective design (Galdon, Hall, Ferrarello, 2019) helps us extrapolate preferred future destinations and design our trajectory from today into the future.

You could say that all designing happens in the future. John Chris Jones give a good description of the relationship between design and the sciences in relation to the future:

‘Both artists and scientists operate on the physical world as it exists in the present (whether it is real or symbolic), while mathematicians operate on abstract relationships that are independent of historical time. Designers, on the other hand, are forever bound to treat as real that which exists only in an imagined future and have to specify ways in which the foreseen thing can be made to exist.’ (Chris Jones, 1992)

While Ranulph Glanville captures the unique quality of designing:

‘I propose that research in design should forge a new type of knowledge, knowledge for [Future Transformation].’ (Glanville, 2005).

It’s this knowledge for transforming the future as opposed to knowledge of the present that can steer us towards a more significant role for design engineering by bridging the societytechnology gap by specifying how these new foreseen things can come into being. How can we steer towards better futures and who decides what better looks like, who is included and excluded in the conversation?

Early in 2020 we experienced the first global pandemic played out in real time. It’s clear in this new unimagined world that design was waiting to respond. We have seen some impressive products and service design solutions tackling the issues, but the real issue is that we were waiting. We were waiting in the traditional design mode of waiting for a problem to arrive, waiting for the design brief, and we now know that we can’t wait any more. We have hit the fast-forward button for design and learnt that strategic avoidance is better that tactical responses to a crisis. The future of design and engineering design have to question our practices and assumptions about the relationship between designing and the future and how we educate the next generation of designers.

We decided to tackle this issue via a design for safety grand challenge at the Royal College of Art’s School of Design with 380 postgraduate design students and over 20 academic staff and invited experts with amajor project over a four-week period sponsored by Logitech. The students worked in groups and were spread around the world in over 50 countries and used online collaborative tools to look at this challenge leading towards a new model for design. We looking at how design could tackle design leadership, design futures, care, health, design for resilience, design for truth and next generation interactions to move beyond waiting to act. We estimated that we dedicated 32 years or 62.000 hours of creative capital designing new responses to emerging and projected future global issues.