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Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
The first issue of a new journal is a moment for celebration and a time for reflection. With this first issue, we launch Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Our launch will occupy two special issues. Our opening editorial offers an opportunity for celebration—in the next issue, we will reflect on what a journal ought to be and do at this moment in human history. Following this short celebration, we will turn the pages of Shè Jì over to thinkers whose work has helped to define the design field today, building bridges to innovation, value creation, the productive economy, and the world we build together. These articles exemplify the scope and quality of the journal we hope to build. Twenty years ago, the design field had only a handful of scholarly and scientific journals. Visible Language was the first in the field, forty years old in 2017. Design Studies came next in 1979, and Design Issues followed in 1984.1 Today, there are over two hundred design journals.2 Of these, around forty are widely acknowledged as significant.3 Of these, a world-wide survey of experts identified fourteen journals with positions of global eminence. Some journals cover such specialist fields as engineering design, ergonomics, and design history. Others are general design journals. Nevertheless, a gap remains, an interdisciplinary gap where professional fields and research disciplines should meet. In this interdisciplinary gap, we will examine the intersection of design, economics, and innovation in various combinations, from various perspectives, and using the methods and methodological frameworks of the many disciplines that contribute to the necessarily interdisciplinary design field. These kinds of articles do appear in the other journals, and in the journals of other fields. Our remit is to provide a forum in which contributors regularly examine these issues. Our interdisciplinary nature has a second focus, as well. So far, few of the research journals in design have managed to find a regular audience among professional designers—or among the leaders in business, industry, and government that use design. And few of the professional design magazines have managed to find a regular readership among scholars and scientists who work with design. This is a problem for a field in which the many kinds of people who work with design every day can learn more and do better by speaking and thinking together. Journals in other fields have managed to bridge the gap. Harvard Business Review is an example: leaders in business and industry as well as management scholars and economists read HBR. Another example is The Economist, a weekly newspaper that scholars and scientists read along with managers, industrialists, financiers, politicians, and civil servants.
1 Gerda Gemser et al., “Quality Perceptions of Design Journals: The Design Scholars’ Perspective,” Design Studies 33, no. 1 (2012): 4. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.destud.2011.09.001. 2 Ken Friedman et al., Design Research Journal Ranking Study: Preliminary Results (Melbourne, Australia: Swinburne University of Technology Faculty of Design, 2008), accessed August 31, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/ 45468. 3 Gemser et al., “Quality Perceptions of Design Journals”: 21.
Copyright © 2015, Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Owner. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.09.002
Editorial
1
4 Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 129. 5 Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 129. 6 For discussions of the four orders of design, see: Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 5–21; Richard Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Design Issues 17, no. 4 (Autumn, 2001): 3–23; Tony Golsby-Smith, “Fourth Order Design: A Practical Perspective,” Design Issues 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 5–25; for an overview of the domains of design, see: Ken Friedman, “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for Design Education,” Visible Language 46, no. 1/2 (2012): 128–151. 7 See Yongqi Lou, Francesca Valsecchi, and Clarisa Diaza, Design Harvests. An Acupuncture Design Research Approach Towards Sustainability (Gothenburg, Sweden: Mistra Urban Futures, 2012). 8 The term “jì” first appears over 2,000 years ago in Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War. While this is a book on military affairs, it is also an early contribution to the fields of organization design, economics, administrative science, political science, and management. Master Sun examines the art of purposeful planning, reflective thinking, and strategic innovation to further the goals of the nation that employs a commander, designing solutions to meet needs. See: Sun Tzu. The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1988).
2
The design field has grown and changed over the past quarter century. Design was once an art focused on the shape of things. It is now both an art and a science, and the focus of design activities have changed as well. Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon defined design where he wrote that everyone designs who works to “[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”4 But Simon wanted to know more—he wanted to understand better how we could change existing situations to preferred situations in a reasoned, reliable way. This, in turn, calls for science—a field that Simon defines as understanding “things: how they are and how they work.”5 Simon spoke of design as a science of the artificial, that is, a science of things that humans conceive, design, and create. And he limited his concept of the design sciences, recognizing, wisely, that anything involving human action will never achieve the reliability or certainty of physics. Nevertheless, we have seen a decisive shift over the past decades. This shift is a transformation from thinking of design as a craft-based artisan skill of designing things to thinking of design across a spectrum of target fields. To describe this spectrum Richard Buchanan spoke of this range as the four orders of design: moving from the traditional artifacts of graphic design and product design to the larger range of systems and services, as well as organizations, societies, and cultures.6 We will address these issues in greater depth in the next issue. There, we will discuss what a journal such as Shè Jì can be—and should be. For now, we say that Shè Jì is a new kind of journal, but a new journal that builds on deep foundations. In launching this new journal, we join a robust conversation that is already visible in the pages of the other journals in this field—and in the journals of related fields. What we bring to the conversation is an interdisciplinary perspective and a slightly different way of working. Explaining our name may help to frame our perspective and our way of working.
About the Name “Shè Jì”7 In Chinese, “shè jì” is the term for design. The term originated in military affairs. It is a word consisting of two characters, “shè” and “jì.” “Shè” means set-up or planning. “Jì” means strategy or calculating. Putting these two characters together, “shè jì” means to “establish a strategy.”8 The product of “shè jì” (design) is “jì” (a strategy, solution, or plan). “Jì” contains the concept of “goal setting” and the concept of “process guiding.” It requires planning and calculation. The shift from the Chinese term “shè jì” to the English term design summarizes the still-developing processes of the modern Chinese design profession and China’s design education. During this era of development, the traditional concept of “shè jì” has been neglected. Many felt that it was not sufficiently clear as a modern profession or the disciplines that support professional development, and others felt that it was a ‘soft’ concept compared with the Western concept of design. This is something of a paradox, as leading design thinkers in the West have turned toward the concept of human-centered design, design thinking, and—in the Scandinavian nations and Finland—these have often been summarized by a concept described as strategic design—a term that is best translated as “shè jì.” There are several core concepts in the Chinese word “shè jì”: It is a somewhat blurred and soft term. It is also somewhat ambiguous, with a focus on practical applicability, a focus on process as well as result, and an emphasis on developmental states over final material. It is interesting to compare this with the practical applicability of the Greek term “phronesis,” knowing what is right to do, as contrasted with “techne,” knowing how to do
she ji
The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Issue No.1, Autumn 2015
something, and “sofia,” knowing about something. It is also interesting to compare the term “shè jì” with the Hebrew word “chokma,” a form of wisdom like the wisdom of phronesis, with an intense focus on practical applicability in daily life and work. The word “shè jì” invokes the concept of systemic strategy. This requires the synthesis of two levels, the comprehensive macro level and the detailed micro level. In terms of classical Chinese culture, this means the synthesis of two structures: “Tao” and “Qi.” “Shè jì” unites quantitative and qualitative approaches. It involves both planning and calculation in the strategic process. In one way, it is a series of strategies and actions based on the analysis of a specific social context. In another way, it also relies on careful and rational calculation. Today, in the networked information era, the importance of calculation in design will become increasingly clear in new and sometimes surprising ways. “Shè jì” is about leadership and management. It means organizational action guided by “jì” (strategy). A deeper consideration of this aspect of the “shè jì” concept suggests parallels both with the explicit and implicit practices of such design traditions as design thinking and co-creation, and with traditions in management such as knowledge management, organizational learning, as well as with such broader concepts as systems thinking.9 It appears in the classic reconsiderations of 20th century industrial innovation exemplified by W. Edwards Deming’s work and the integrated principles of leadership sometimes described as “Toyota Way.”10 The Chinese concept of “shè jì” extends the application field of design. It is aligned with the growth of design fields today, embracing such approaches as social design, system design, and strategic design. For us, the concept of “shè jì” offers an approach to design, economics, and innovation that is built on a meeting point between East and West. Re-invigorating the concept of “shè jì” in China through an international forum has positive significance. It does not mean that Chinese design will diverge from what is happening in the rest of the world. It is a renaissance, not a restoration. To reinvigorate the concept of “shè jì” allows us to bridge ancient ideas and modern, traditional culture and experimental culture, bringing them together with an encompassing attitude that resonates easily with many kinds of people.
9 While it is not possible to develop these concepts here, it is possible to note such contributions as Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, eds., Managing as Designing (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jurgen Faust and Sabine Junginger, eds., Designing Business and Management (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2016) [in press]; Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Earthscan, 2009). 10 See, for example: W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1993). Also see: Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way. 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer (New York: McGrawHill Professional, 2004). 11 The authors of this editorial experience this in our own lives. One of us is an Australian who lives in Sweden, working in universities in Shanghai and Melbourne. Two of us are Chinese—one works in Shanghai and Helsinki, the other in Shanghai while managing a journal published by a company based in Amsterdam and London.
Visions of “Shè Jì” In an era of globalization, designers from the East and the West have a duty to put forward their views as “critical regionalists.” The quest for a cultural consciousness offers an opportunity for original Chinese design thinking to flourish. This is equally true for India … and for Europe, North America, and South America. To speak of a critical regionalism is to acknowledge that each of us finds ourselves born into a social world, embedded in a culture. We grow into multiple situations in life and work. Whoever we are, to be a critical regionalist requires us to be critical, reflective, and responsive to our own culture—all three at the same time; and it requires us to look toward other cultures with appreciative inquiry, reflection, and responsiveness.11 In the process of realizing the renaissance of the “shè jì” system, some trends indicate the new characteristics and areas of future design around the world: Close attention to wicked problems in social, cultural, and economic systems, as well as organizational and industrial development;
Editorial
3
12 One example of the ideas emerging in our network is the DesignX statement written in 2014 by The Design Collaborative. In alphabetical order, the authors are: Ken Friedman (Tongji University, College of Design and Innovation and Swinburne University Centre for Design Innovation), Yongqi Lou (Tongji), Don Norman (University of California, San Diego, Design Lab), Pieter Jan Stappers (Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering), Ena Voûte (Delft), and Patrick Whitney (Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design). “DesignX: A Future Path for Design,” last modified December 4, 2014, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ designx_a_future_pa.html.
Using design through strategic and systematic tools to achieve social, economic, and cultural goals in a dynamic way; Active intervention in these fields to generate positive change; The connection of design and computation: the calculation we require for the quantitative aspects of design requires the latest findings of computer science, data management, and informatics; It is about management and leadership, and it is about people. It requires the integration of top-down decisions and bottom-up consensus in a series of human actions to realize goals. To realize this perspective, we must reinvigorate the concept of “shè jì” at the level of science and technology, and at systemic and strategic levels. Adapting to an era of change, we must “shè (set up)” an appropriate “jì (vision and strategy)” for the future, enabling human beings to live as they wish to live in a sustainable way. These goals are not restricted to the design discipline or the design profession: they are goals for humanity as a whole in the context of inclusive wellbeing.
“Shè Jì” in Action: Tongji University College of Design and Innovation Design education at Tongji University started in the 1940s. Linked with architecture for 70 years, the Bauhaus had a huge impact on our development. In 2009, Tongji University moved the design department out of the architecture school, establishing a new school: the College of Design and Innovation. This was a response to the new characters and challenges of this era, a “Shè Jì” of education and research. The goal of this new school is to reshape design education and research in the context of the forces transforming technology, society, and the economy. The new digital, networked, knowledge economy calls for a new design characterized by a coherent approach to intangible and systemic issues such as services, processes, interactions, and mechanism, as well as images, artifacts, and products. This journal was born in the context of our research mission. In this, we are part of a larger community of universities, research centers, professional organizations, businesses, government agencies, and more that seek to understand the forces of design, economics, and innovation—using what we learn to find, identify, and solve problems and to create new opportunities even where problems may not emerge.12 As producers of the journal, we want our readers to know who we are. As colleagues and partners to a wide range of universities, design schools, and organizations, we point proudly to a rich network of collaborators with whom we participate in dozens of projects from this journal to joint laboratories and degree programs, from the Global Design Factory Network to CUMULUS, from DESIS to the research community coalescing around the idea of DesignX—a name that is an experimental variable rather than a platform.
About the Journal Shè Jì is an interdisciplinary journal located at the intersection of design, economics, and innovation. Created in a Chinese University with an international publisher based in the Netherlands, we have an international editorial team, and a name in Chinese and English. Welcome to the first issue of Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Ken Friedman Yongqi Lou Jin Ma
4
she ji
The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Issue No.1, Autumn 2015
The first issue of a new journal is a moment for celebration and a time for reflection. With this first issue, we launch Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Our launch will occupy two special issues. Our opening editorial offers an opportunity for celebration—in the next issue, we will reflect on what a journal ought to be and do at this moment in human history. Following this short celebration, we will turn the pages of Shè Jì over to thinkers whose work has helped to define the design field today, building bridges to innovation, value creation, the productive economy, and the world we build together. These articles exemplify the scope and quality of the journal we hope to build. Twenty years ago, the design field had only a handful of scholarly and scientific journals. Visible Language was the first in the field, forty years old in 2017. Design Studies came next in 1979, and Design Issues followed in 1984.1 Today, there are over two hundred design journals.2 Of these, around forty are widely acknowledged as significant.3 Of these, a world-wide survey of experts identified fourteen journals with positions of global eminence. Some journals cover such specialist fields as engineering design, ergonomics, and design history. Others are general design journals. Nevertheless, a gap remains, an interdisciplinary gap where professional fields and research disciplines should meet. In this interdisciplinary gap, we will examine the intersection of design, economics, and innovation in various combinations, from various perspectives, and using the methods and methodological frameworks of the many disciplines that contribute to the necessarily interdisciplinary design field. These kinds of articles do appear in the other journals, and in the journals of other fields. Our remit is to provide a forum in which contributors regularly examine these issues. Our interdisciplinary nature has a second focus, as well. So far, few of the research journals in design have managed to find a regular audience among professional designers—or among the leaders in business, industry, and government that use design. And few of the professional design magazines have managed to find a regular readership among scholars and scientists who work with design. This is a problem for a field in which the many kinds of people who work with design every day can learn more and do better by speaking and thinking together. Journals in other fields have managed to bridge the gap. Harvard Business Review is an example: leaders in business and industry as well as management scholars and economists read HBR. Another example is The Economist, a weekly newspaper that scholars and scientists read along with managers, industrialists, financiers, politicians, and civil servants.
1 Gerda Gemser et al., “Quality Perceptions of Design Journals: The Design Scholars’ Perspective,” Design Studies 33, no. 1 (2012): 4. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.destud.2011.09.001. 2 Ken Friedman et al., Design Research Journal Ranking Study: Preliminary Results (Melbourne, Australia: Swinburne University of Technology Faculty of Design, 2008), accessed August 31, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/ 45468. 3 Gemser et al., “Quality Perceptions of Design Journals”: 21.
Copyright © 2015, Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Owner. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.09.002
Editorial
1
4 Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 129. 5 Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 129. 6 For discussions of the four orders of design, see: Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 5–21; Richard Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Design Issues 17, no. 4 (Autumn, 2001): 3–23; Tony Golsby-Smith, “Fourth Order Design: A Practical Perspective,” Design Issues 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 5–25; for an overview of the domains of design, see: Ken Friedman, “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future for Design Education,” Visible Language 46, no. 1/2 (2012): 128–151. 7 See Yongqi Lou, Francesca Valsecchi, and Clarisa Diaza, Design Harvests. An Acupuncture Design Research Approach Towards Sustainability (Gothenburg, Sweden: Mistra Urban Futures, 2012). 8 The term “jì” first appears over 2,000 years ago in Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War. While this is a book on military affairs, it is also an early contribution to the fields of organization design, economics, administrative science, political science, and management. Master Sun examines the art of purposeful planning, reflective thinking, and strategic innovation to further the goals of the nation that employs a commander, designing solutions to meet needs. See: Sun Tzu. The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1988).
2
The design field has grown and changed over the past quarter century. Design was once an art focused on the shape of things. It is now both an art and a science, and the focus of design activities have changed as well. Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon defined design where he wrote that everyone designs who works to “[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”4 But Simon wanted to know more—he wanted to understand better how we could change existing situations to preferred situations in a reasoned, reliable way. This, in turn, calls for science—a field that Simon defines as understanding “things: how they are and how they work.”5 Simon spoke of design as a science of the artificial, that is, a science of things that humans conceive, design, and create. And he limited his concept of the design sciences, recognizing, wisely, that anything involving human action will never achieve the reliability or certainty of physics. Nevertheless, we have seen a decisive shift over the past decades. This shift is a transformation from thinking of design as a craft-based artisan skill of designing things to thinking of design across a spectrum of target fields. To describe this spectrum Richard Buchanan spoke of this range as the four orders of design: moving from the traditional artifacts of graphic design and product design to the larger range of systems and services, as well as organizations, societies, and cultures.6 We will address these issues in greater depth in the next issue. There, we will discuss what a journal such as Shè Jì can be—and should be. For now, we say that Shè Jì is a new kind of journal, but a new journal that builds on deep foundations. In launching this new journal, we join a robust conversation that is already visible in the pages of the other journals in this field—and in the journals of related fields. What we bring to the conversation is an interdisciplinary perspective and a slightly different way of working. Explaining our name may help to frame our perspective and our way of working.
About the Name “Shè Jì”7 In Chinese, “shè jì” is the term for design. The term originated in military affairs. It is a word consisting of two characters, “shè” and “jì.” “Shè” means set-up or planning. “Jì” means strategy or calculating. Putting these two characters together, “shè jì” means to “establish a strategy.”8 The product of “shè jì” (design) is “jì” (a strategy, solution, or plan). “Jì” contains the concept of “goal setting” and the concept of “process guiding.” It requires planning and calculation. The shift from the Chinese term “shè jì” to the English term design summarizes the still-developing processes of the modern Chinese design profession and China’s design education. During this era of development, the traditional concept of “shè jì” has been neglected. Many felt that it was not sufficiently clear as a modern profession or the disciplines that support professional development, and others felt that it was a ‘soft’ concept compared with the Western concept of design. This is something of a paradox, as leading design thinkers in the West have turned toward the concept of human-centered design, design thinking, and—in the Scandinavian nations and Finland—these have often been summarized by a concept described as strategic design—a term that is best translated as “shè jì.” There are several core concepts in the Chinese word “shè jì”: It is a somewhat blurred and soft term. It is also somewhat ambiguous, with a focus on practical applicability, a focus on process as well as result, and an emphasis on developmental states over final material. It is interesting to compare this with the practical applicability of the Greek term “phronesis,” knowing what is right to do, as contrasted with “techne,” knowing how to do
she ji
The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Issue No.1, Autumn 2015
something, and “sofia,” knowing about something. It is also interesting to compare the term “shè jì” with the Hebrew word “chokma,” a form of wisdom like the wisdom of phronesis, with an intense focus on practical applicability in daily life and work. The word “shè jì” invokes the concept of systemic strategy. This requires the synthesis of two levels, the comprehensive macro level and the detailed micro level. In terms of classical Chinese culture, this means the synthesis of two structures: “Tao” and “Qi.” “Shè jì” unites quantitative and qualitative approaches. It involves both planning and calculation in the strategic process. In one way, it is a series of strategies and actions based on the analysis of a specific social context. In another way, it also relies on careful and rational calculation. Today, in the networked information era, the importance of calculation in design will become increasingly clear in new and sometimes surprising ways. “Shè jì” is about leadership and management. It means organizational action guided by “jì” (strategy). A deeper consideration of this aspect of the “shè jì” concept suggests parallels both with the explicit and implicit practices of such design traditions as design thinking and co-creation, and with traditions in management such as knowledge management, organizational learning, as well as with such broader concepts as systems thinking.9 It appears in the classic reconsiderations of 20th century industrial innovation exemplified by W. Edwards Deming’s work and the integrated principles of leadership sometimes described as “Toyota Way.”10 The Chinese concept of “shè jì” extends the application field of design. It is aligned with the growth of design fields today, embracing such approaches as social design, system design, and strategic design. For us, the concept of “shè jì” offers an approach to design, economics, and innovation that is built on a meeting point between East and West. Re-invigorating the concept of “shè jì” in China through an international forum has positive significance. It does not mean that Chinese design will diverge from what is happening in the rest of the world. It is a renaissance, not a restoration. To reinvigorate the concept of “shè jì” allows us to bridge ancient ideas and modern, traditional culture and experimental culture, bringing them together with an encompassing attitude that resonates easily with many kinds of people.
9 While it is not possible to develop these concepts here, it is possible to note such contributions as Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, eds., Managing as Designing (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jurgen Faust and Sabine Junginger, eds., Designing Business and Management (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2016) [in press]; Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Earthscan, 2009). 10 See, for example: W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1993). Also see: Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way. 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer (New York: McGrawHill Professional, 2004). 11 The authors of this editorial experience this in our own lives. One of us is an Australian who lives in Sweden, working in universities in Shanghai and Melbourne. Two of us are Chinese—one works in Shanghai and Helsinki, the other in Shanghai while managing a journal published by a company based in Amsterdam and London.
Visions of “Shè Jì” In an era of globalization, designers from the East and the West have a duty to put forward their views as “critical regionalists.” The quest for a cultural consciousness offers an opportunity for original Chinese design thinking to flourish. This is equally true for India … and for Europe, North America, and South America. To speak of a critical regionalism is to acknowledge that each of us finds ourselves born into a social world, embedded in a culture. We grow into multiple situations in life and work. Whoever we are, to be a critical regionalist requires us to be critical, reflective, and responsive to our own culture—all three at the same time; and it requires us to look toward other cultures with appreciative inquiry, reflection, and responsiveness.11 In the process of realizing the renaissance of the “shè jì” system, some trends indicate the new characteristics and areas of future design around the world: Close attention to wicked problems in social, cultural, and economic systems, as well as organizational and industrial development;
Editorial
3
12 One example of the ideas emerging in our network is the DesignX statement written in 2014 by The Design Collaborative. In alphabetical order, the authors are: Ken Friedman (Tongji University, College of Design and Innovation and Swinburne University Centre for Design Innovation), Yongqi Lou (Tongji), Don Norman (University of California, San Diego, Design Lab), Pieter Jan Stappers (Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering), Ena Voûte (Delft), and Patrick Whitney (Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design). “DesignX: A Future Path for Design,” last modified December 4, 2014, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ designx_a_future_pa.html.
Using design through strategic and systematic tools to achieve social, economic, and cultural goals in a dynamic way; Active intervention in these fields to generate positive change; The connection of design and computation: the calculation we require for the quantitative aspects of design requires the latest findings of computer science, data management, and informatics; It is about management and leadership, and it is about people. It requires the integration of top-down decisions and bottom-up consensus in a series of human actions to realize goals. To realize this perspective, we must reinvigorate the concept of “shè jì” at the level of science and technology, and at systemic and strategic levels. Adapting to an era of change, we must “shè (set up)” an appropriate “jì (vision and strategy)” for the future, enabling human beings to live as they wish to live in a sustainable way. These goals are not restricted to the design discipline or the design profession: they are goals for humanity as a whole in the context of inclusive wellbeing.
“Shè Jì” in Action: Tongji University College of Design and Innovation Design education at Tongji University started in the 1940s. Linked with architecture for 70 years, the Bauhaus had a huge impact on our development. In 2009, Tongji University moved the design department out of the architecture school, establishing a new school: the College of Design and Innovation. This was a response to the new characters and challenges of this era, a “Shè Jì” of education and research. The goal of this new school is to reshape design education and research in the context of the forces transforming technology, society, and the economy. The new digital, networked, knowledge economy calls for a new design characterized by a coherent approach to intangible and systemic issues such as services, processes, interactions, and mechanism, as well as images, artifacts, and products. This journal was born in the context of our research mission. In this, we are part of a larger community of universities, research centers, professional organizations, businesses, government agencies, and more that seek to understand the forces of design, economics, and innovation—using what we learn to find, identify, and solve problems and to create new opportunities even where problems may not emerge.12 As producers of the journal, we want our readers to know who we are. As colleagues and partners to a wide range of universities, design schools, and organizations, we point proudly to a rich network of collaborators with whom we participate in dozens of projects from this journal to joint laboratories and degree programs, from the Global Design Factory Network to CUMULUS, from DESIS to the research community coalescing around the idea of DesignX—a name that is an experimental variable rather than a platform.
About the Journal Shè Jì is an interdisciplinary journal located at the intersection of design, economics, and innovation. Created in a Chinese University with an international publisher based in the Netherlands, we have an international editorial team, and a name in Chinese and English. Welcome to the first issue of Shè Jì: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Ken Friedman Yongqi Lou Jin Ma
4
she ji
The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Issue No.1, Autumn 2015