Kai Riedesser traveled to Italy, Sweden, and the United States to discover ideas, processes, and methods related to design that were completely outside of the realm of architecture.
Kai Riedesser
Southern California Institute of Architecture
Courtesy of Kundalini Design.
Jury
Leigh Breslau (Chair)
Larry Kearns
Reed Kroloff
In the summer of 2001, I set out to discover ideas, processes, and methods related to design that were completely outside of the realm of architecture. I focused my research on product design, advertising, and web design. I wanted to find out more about the relevance of design for these companies and the strategies they were using in order to keep up their excellent design skills. The goal of this paper is to introduce some of these ideas to the architectural practice.
Clearly, I was frustrated with the common process used to generate architecture. Not only in the sense of the initial design phase, which is mostly a conglomerate of empirical knowledge mixed with a psychological automatism, but also in the way initial ideas get transformed into reality. The companies that I discuss show that there are very strong concepts that help to transform great ideas into reality, without losing their strength. The research also show that every design project needs to grow out of a serious research phase that grounds the ideas in a sociocultural, as well as technical sense.
The task of getting companies to talk about their processes was not easy. The idea of competition might be of vital relevance for the creation of great design, but it also creates politics of hindrance, stopping the free flow of ideas. Personally, I’m a big advocate of freely sharing ideas, not just among our various professions, but also among the users of our services.
In the final report, you can learn about the approaches of various design companies with all kinds of backgrounds. I found very diverse strategies, often times even unconventional but pivotal, all of which should be considered by architects.
I conducted my research mostly through interviews, which defines the structure of the paper discussing each company separately. Additionally, you will find work examples that illustrates some of the discovered ideas. The paper concludes with a couple of suggestions, meant to inspire architects and trying to formulate another logic for generating innovative work that goes beyond the rigid and outdated structures suggested by architecture associations worldwide, like the AIA, RIBA, and so on.
Services from inflate range from product and architectural design, all the way to the production. Courtesy of inflate.
Blood glucose measuring device. Courtesy of Design Continuum.
Most of the time we don’t allow us the luxury to be critical, we often accept given situations without questioning.
Kai Riedesser
The initial research proposal looked into innovation, communication, and the issue of product in the design business. Here are the most important ideas that were the result of these questions.
All of the above was extremely important for my personal understanding of an expanded design practice that let me have insight into processes that I didn't know existed. A central aspect of my future work will be to critically work with these insights that I got from my studies and integrate them where I can. On that note I would like to conclude this paper with a thought from Michael Speaks about Design Intelligence, future and new processes in young offices:
“Design practices with high design intelligence quotients are able to manipulate the problem given in search of opportunities that can be exploited, thus allowing for a greater degree of innovation; such practices adjust to changing conditions without being locked into categories set out in the problem as given, and are almost always less susceptible to hostile environmental changes. Such practices also view design as dynamical and nonlinear and not as a process with a beginning, middle, and end. Accordingly, the relationship between thinking and doing becomes more and more blurred so that thinking becomes doing and doing becomes thinking engendering highly collaborative forms of practice that are already changing the face of architecture. . . . If architecture is to remain relevant it must also adapt and learn to see innovation where it arises—often on the periphery or outside the limits of its own body.” [1]
Well said, there is a lot to do. Let’s start to discover and reinvent.
Notes
[1] Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence,” in Latent Utopias: Experiments within Contemporary Architecture, ed. Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schuhmacher (Vienna/New York: Springer Verlag, 2002).
Kai Riedesser
Southern California Institute of Architecture
