#design professions

[urbanverse-blog]

Future of Design #futrchat follow up

Last Thursday, I co-hosted the tenth Association of Professional Futurists (APF) futrchat on twitter. Since we set up the Profuturists posterous blog, I haven't been cross posting those chat blogs here. I should have, especially given this month's topic, the Future of Design. Maree Conway was my co-host and Design Intelligence served as the first geo-host. They were simply fantastic, thank you both!

futrchat experience In one hour, ninety people from eleven countries posted over 800 comments. Participants came from many backgrounds, futurists, foresight professionals, architects, designers, planners and emergent thinkers of all types. Big business like IBM and Cisco, media like Architecture Record and Reed Construction Data, and institutions like American Architecture Foundation, American Institute of Architects, and International Interior Designers Association came. Plus a slew of brilliant individuals.

And we had a blast. It's hard for me to describe the onslaught of asynchronistic, collective intelligence experienced at this firehose wide-open pace. You simply cannot digest it all during the chat. Now the ebook seems very calm, orderly. and takes only a bit of time to skim. In contrast, the futrchat experience is not orderly; it's flat-out chaotic. Yet relevant, useful ideas emerge. You can find patterns and threads. It's a window into many other worlds through links and exchanges. And ultimately, it simply gives you insights and perspectives from so many people that would be otherwise impossible to access without extreme effort. 

We covered design in the broad sense of design and design thinking that applies to objects as well as organizations and issues. One of the questions even dealt with economics - Can design shape future economics?  Future of Design ebook Here's the ebook of the conversation. I generated a table of contents and list of links that were mentioned, indexed participants names/twitter accounts at the back and highlighted some of the best comments, although not all, there's many others that are equally valuable. 

You can read the Future of Design futrchat in the cool ebook format (which I recommend as a higher quality reading experience, and regrettably cannot be embedded here) or by pdf below. 

Thanks to all that came to the Association of Professional Futurists futrchat. Next month's futrchat will be Thursday 18 August 4:00-5:00pm ET/NYC; 9:00pm BST/London; Friday 6:00am Sydney. It's open to all. 

More resources Before the event, I posted a blog about the future of design on the Profuturists posterous.   After the event, I posted a follow-up blog on the Profuturists posterous.   Previously on this blog, I've covered design futures.  And I have a number of links about design on delicious that are worth seeing.

Your ideas ---  If you had been there, or if you were there, what would you say about the future of design? Do designers need to be futurists, or do we even have a claim in that space? Are futurists necessarily designing? Is design innovation essential for us to survive on this planet? What do you think?  image: Seed Cathedral  detail, UK Pavilion Shanghai Expo 2010 by Thomas Heatherwick architect Bourdeaux Water Gardens by Catherine Mosbach 

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[urbanverse-blog]

New Blog at Urbanverse.net

Hello All, 

I've just opened the sister blog to this posterous, at http:urbanverse.net. Today I posted on the future of architects. here's part of the entry post.

An intelligent conversation about architects

Over the past couple of years, an avalanche of criticism slammed architects. We are whiny, navel watchers, the worst profession for getting hired, fetish-driven egomanics, and cheap (even cheating) employers. We’ve created unhealthy, unwelcoming car-obsessed cities full of oversized, energy guzzling ugly buildings. The architecture profession is a place of haves and have nots, frequently practiced for passion more than profit.

Actually that last line is true. 

To read the rest, please visit me at urbanverse.net.

I'll be posting both places, this posterous for shorter posts, and urbanverse.net for longer ones.

Thanks for stopping in! 

[woodvavb027-blog]

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[woodvavb027-blog]

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