Industrial Design

This year’s VID workshop was led by Clive van Heerden of «VHM Design Futures». He gained recognition for his futuristic concepts at Philips and currently teaches at institutions like the Royal College of Art, MIT Media Lab, Central Saint Martins, NYU, and various textile universities in the UK and the Netherlands.

The purpose of the workshop was to contrast linear and adaptive design future methodologies. Students worked with a series of tools to develop future lifestyle and technology scenarios as design provocations to elicit contextual insights. Unlike many future methodologies which tend to be based on the primacy of technology and start with contemporary, established trends, this workshop involved interrogating weak signals, cataclysmic events and mainstream trends drawn from a wide range of social, political, environmental, cultural and technological and other domains. The method involves describing a future contest based on a multiplicity of determinants that depict a lifestyle at a given time period in the future. The students used these information sources in combination with trends they had identified in a mapping exercise. They interrogated, classified and clustered the stimulus material to develop a narrative which they then used as the basis for a short movie. The purpose of the movies is to stimulate discussion and debate around a specific issue - testing futures rather than predicting them.