Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement

we’re about to see a shift away from this design paradigm to what is known as design for emergence.

how design has become mass user-centered, driven by rules of optimization, efficiency and engineering.

There will always be designers to design the Hummers and the bumper stickers, and there will always be designers to make websites to propagate the warnings and promises of David Foster Wallace. But a new generation of designers has emerged, concerned with designing strategies to subvert this “natural default-setting” in which each person understand... See more

Design has evolved to meet the challenge of the new relationship between people and the material goods they need. Today, designers — artisans, manufacturers, engineers, architects — think far beyond the way things look. Comparing pre-industrial design to post-industrial design with a picture is absurd. Critiquing a modern object based on its appear... See more

In this article, I set to understand and explore fundamental thinking that examines a new design worldview. A proposal to change our ways of working as designers, first in voluntary communities (which we already have, but with different goals) and then to be better equipped to understand and explore as individuals and as a community.