Creating Value

Creating value

Design is cultural production and therefore it can be perceived as a seismograph of society. It reflects how we think our environments should look like, and how we organize them physically. Design cultures show us our assumptions about our shared understandings and they tell us how we think interactions and relations have to be shaped in material and immaterial images – imagination.

Design is projective and is about the realization of those projections, but foremost about the realities that are created by it, such as objects, materialized practical ideas, shared understanding, ideologies, identity and identification, community bonding and other social constructs. The arm of design reaches far in our lives. Or the other way around, many other fields of thought and professional disciplines influence the way we design.

Of course the ‘we’ is a multiplicity of we’s. The variety of problems, perspectives and possibilities do progress over time through social, political, cultural, economic and technological influences, which are at stake in the large arrays of local and global contexts. Design is the interface between individuals, things and situations. It determinates how humans, users, and citizens deal with themselves and each other in the short and long term.

Reason enough to think well about it how to do this. Especially if we wish to add new design(ed) artefacts to a world that suffers from cultural overweight and environmental pollution. Before, while and after a product, a building, a situation, a service, an idea, communication, an organisation structure, etc. – and the interference between them – is developed one have to consider if this creates real value for individual people and society at large.

Evert Ypma and his colleagues work on new perspectives and scenarios for design and societal development. This is undertaken by initiating design projects, design research, advice, education, publishing and lectures.