Styling the future. A philosophical approach to design and scenarios

Since the end of the 1980s – the Decade of Style (Mort, 1996) – the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times (Whicher et al., 2015) see a focus on style as a sign of design’s immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed (Brown, 2008; Martin, 2009; Neumeier, 2009) as a way of taking design away from its early stage as ‘mere’ styling, towards the more thoughtful, serious matters of business. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is of a different mind however. ‘Style,’ he writes (1995, p.31), ‘amounts to innovation.’ For us this engages not only a rethinking of design practice in particular, but also a reconsideration of the guiding principles of scenario planning. Deleuze’s thought entails the opportunity for styling to be an act that participates in driving all creativity towards making a successful future impact (Flynn & Chatman, 2004; Cox, 2005). A philosophical disruption of current design and scenarios orthodoxies offers a way of considering that style has a key role in the production of the future. Here, then, we will investigate the creative, even innovative, opportunities that emerge from a reworking of the value of style that comes from a critique of Design Thinking, a perspective on future-thinking (especially scenario planning (e.g. Schwartz, 1991; Li, 2014; Ramirez & Selin, 2014), but also some work from organisation and management studies (e.g. Tsoukas, 2005a, 2005b)), and an encounter with philosophy (particularly the work of Deleuze & Guattari (1984, 1987, 1994). We will highlight the affective capacities of style – in design and scenarios, both as creative constructing of futures – by way of creatively accessing uncertainty, complexity and indeterminacy in the production of strategic maps for living (both individuals and organisations).

[1]  Peter Schwartz,et al.  The art of the long view , 1991 .

[2]  Ilya Prigogine,et al.  From Being To Becoming , 1980 .

[3]  Matt Malpass,et al.  Between Wit and Reason: Defining Associative, Speculative, and Critical Design in Practice , 2013 .

[4]  Roger Martin.  The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage , 2009 .

[5]  Jerome S. Bruner,et al.  Self-making and world-making , 1991 .

[6]  Jamie Brassett.  Poised and Complex: The Becoming Each Other of Philosophy, Design and Innovation , 2015 .

[7]  Cynthia Selin,et al.  Plausibility and probability in scenario planning , 2014 .

[8]  Roberto Verganti,et al.  Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean , 2009 .

[9]  Stephen Procter,et al.  Scenarios and counterfactuals as modal narratives , 2009 .

[10]  Ulla Johansson-Sköldberg,et al.  Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures , 2013 .

[11]  Victor Margolin,et al.  Design, the Future and the Human Spirit , 2007, Design Issues.

[12]  F. Guattari,et al.  Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature , 1986 .

[13]  Elaine Romanelli,et al.  Convergence and Upheaval: Managing the Unsteady Pace of Organizational Evolution , 1986 .

[14]  S. Knittel.  The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory , 2014 .

[15]  Ilya Prigogine,et al.  Order out of chaos , 1984 .

[16]  Anthony Dunne,et al.  Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming , 2013 .

[17]  Peter Schwartz,et al.  The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World , 1996 .

[18]  Andy Dong,et al.  Design × innovation: perspective or evidence-based practices† , 2015 .

[19]  Clayton M. Christensen.  The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail , 2013 .

[20]  Tim Brown,et al.  Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation , 2009 .

[21]  Marty Neumeier,et al.  The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation , 2008 .

[22]  S. Inayatullah.  Causal layered analysis , 1998 .

[23]  Cameron Tonkinwise,et al.  A taste for practices: Unrepressing style in design thinking , 2011 .

[24]  Tony Fry,et al.  Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice , 2008 .

[25]  Zhanzi Li.  Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and Translation , 2014 .

[26]  Graham Vickers,et al.  Style in Product Design , 1992 .

[27]  A. D. Boever,et al.  'Technical mentality' revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon , 2012 .

[28]  James S. Corum,et al.  Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings. , 1994 .

[29]  Michael L. Tushman,et al.  Managing Strategic Innovation and Change , 2012 .

[30]  Jamie Brassett,et al.  Networks: Open, closed or complex-Connecting philosophy, design and innovation , 2013, 2013 IEEE Tsinghua International Design Management Symposium.

[31]  Dirk Snelders,et al.  Complementing intuition: insights on styling as a strategic tool , 2007 .

[32]  A. Whitehead.  Adventures of ideas , 1933 .

[33]  Arie Rip,et al.  Technology as prospective ontology , 2009, Synthese.

[34]  Kevin McCullagh.  Stepping Up: Design Thinking Has Uncovered Real Opportunities , 2010 .

[35]  Jane Fulton Suri,et al.  The Experience of Evolution: Developments in Design Practice , 2003 .

[36]  B. Massumi.  Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts , 2011 .

[37]  G. M. Bolling,et al.  A Greek-English Lexicon , 1926 .

[38]  Brenda Dervin,et al.  Sense-making theory and practice: an overview of user interests in knowledge seeking and use , 1998, J. Knowl. Manag..

[39]  Bengt-Arne Vedin,et al.  Design-Inspired Innovation , 2006 .

[40]  Sohail Inayatullah,et al.  Causal Layered Analysis: Theory, historical context, and case studies , 2004 .

[41]  Lucy Kimbell,et al.  Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I , 2011 .

[42]  Alain Findeli,et al.  L'Eclipse De L'Objet Dans Les ThéOries Du Projet En Design , 2005 .

[43]  Derek Hales,et al.  Design fictions an introduction and provisional taxonomy , 2013, Digit. Creativity.

[44]  Angela Wilkinson,et al.  Collaborative Futures: Integrating Foresight with Design in Large Scale Innovation Processes-Seeing and Seeding the Futures of Europe , 2014 .

[45]  M. Bussey.  Foresight Work as Bridge Building: Poetry, Presence and Beyond , 2013 .

[46]  S. Procter,et al.  Modal narratives, possible worlds and strategic foresight , 2009 .