Abstract

As a part of JMP at TU Delft, we had the opportunity to design for implementation of sex education in Indonesia. We were unable to explore the culture of Bali together as a design team because of which we had our own assumptions, perceptions of what the culture is or could be. And most importantly in the project we had reduced a whole culture to a set of constraints we needed to design for. This was deeply troubling. So in order to tackle this issue of culture clash and the need to be sensitive to other cultures, this project was born. The cultural element of Japan and their design philosophy were an inspiration. Their design philosophy and culture are weaved together to form one coherent Japanese Design Philosophy. To address the cultural dilemma for designers, it was decided to bring design philosophies into this project so that one could frame design philosophies based on the culture they design for. The target group for this project was the Master’s design students of TU Delft from the Industrial Design Engineering department. The research began with understanding of existing design philosophies such as Japanese Design Philosophies, Bauhaus and De-Stijl movements, Buen-Vivir centric design model. These formed the basis on how the design philosophies manifested and how it was culturally connected with their respective cultures. Interviewing two design studios viz. Butterflyworks, Netherlands and Whitenoise Design, India gave an opportunity to understand the workings, the tools they used for designing and gave an in-depth understanding of their design philosophy. These case studies provided a strong basic understanding of design philosophy and when should one consider a design philosophy a design philosophy. Keeping this in mind, the next step was to see how one can frame design philosophies depending on a certain context and culture. This was executed by having design students from TU Delft undergoing co-developing sessions using sensitising material and insights from Cultura tool. Students from the sessions developed the design philosophies which were rooted to the context and the culture. These sessions were analysed to extract the process of developing design philosophies along with the content that required to develop the design philosophies. These inputs were further translated to toolkit requirements and interventions. This way a toolkit could aid the designers in developing culture and context driven design philosophies. The ideation for the toolkit began with ‘The Card Set’ which was tested with designers. Though it had some flaws, the participants were able to successfully develop design philosophies. A new concept ‘The Board Set’ was born which was much more refined. In order to make the interactions much more fun and meaningful, a third concept ‘The Block Set’ was developed. This involved exploration cards, blocks, response sheets. The designers would undergo initial exploration of self, culture and later develop the design philosophy as a team. This was surveyed with designers, who mentioned that the toolkit definitely provides moments of reflection and brings teams and cultures together without compromising on either of them.