Image credit: Sara Hibbert
Professor Rachel Cooper of Lancaster University gave the third LDoc Keynote Lecture to an audience of postgraduate design students, academics and practitioners. The lecture took place on 18 June 2015 at the Royal College of Art, London. Watch the video here.
Her topic is Design for Growth and Prosperity: the Role of Design Research. The global challenges that face contemporary society are as great as ever, climate change, demographics, ageing populations in the west, poverty and unemployment amongst the young, social cohesion, and the movement of everything. What can design and design research contribute to these challenges? Designers both contribute to the problems but can also provide solutions. There is a broader role design can play in shaping society and business, co-design and public involvement. Design is an enabler, helping to unlock latent creativity, developing solutions to problems and shaping the future. Design research no longer resides in silos of disciplines such as product design, graphic design, it moves across boundaries to address Issues such as sustainability, wellbeing and health, as well as all aspects of innovation. Design research does not operate in isolation, in conjunction with science and social science there are significant opportunities to address global challenges. This presentation will address some of these issues with examples of current research.
Image credits: Roger Whitham & Sara Hibbert