Author Description

Design has always been a visionary pursuit and a visionary practice - one that projects the future while remaining deeply grounded in the past and the present. Design is also a socio-cultural practice. The link between vision as a mental activity - imagining a future - and its accomplishment in the world - the building of the imagined future - is design. Design's principal focus is the making of things, whether material entities, virtually produced material entities, or fully virtual entities. Because design's principal enterprise is the making of things that operate in the world - a world unfolding - design is an agent of the future. Design as a literacy is a way of envisioning, thinking and acting simultaneously in the world and is, therefore, applicable to any discipline, field or profession. It has the capacity to catalyze innovations in one's own field, and as a platform, it has the capacity to catalyze distinctive innovation across many fields. We believe it is an essential literacy for the re-calibration of our educational system if we want to prepare our students to both thrive and have agency in their future.Beyond design for making things (good design = beautiful useful things), and design for innovation (good design = distinctly new beautiful and useful things), design shapes contexts for things to happen. Design is a foundational way for encountering, seeing, understanding, and operating in the material world. It absorbs the complexity of the world because it vigorously pursues the relationship between things and the contexts in which they are embedded. These contexts are complex and they are socio-technological in nature. The way we use things is integrally linked to why we use them. But design is also a powerful tool for working on the world as well as in it. Design has a capacity to make things that resonate. Resonance means that there is a strong relationship of exchange. Resonating in the world can lead to change on the world.This book was begun as