Welcome to the system design Blog

This blog has been created to disseminate and share knowledge about System Design within the design communities.

Designers are used to work on products and they learned how to control its design and production process. However the evolution of social, technical and economic systems is running very fast, changing the role and the structure of industrial production. The “industry” designers refer to has no longer the same role in our economies, nor is it organised the same way as few years ago. The whole system of production and consumption is changing, becoming more complex and diversified. The success, or even the survival of several industrial companies depends on their capability to interpret such change and to offer specific, context-dependent and highly customised solutions.

True, there may be designers in the future, who will keep working on products, whose nature and characteristics are also changing. But more and more designers will be required to work with companies, to interpret the above mentioned change in the production and consumption system and to propose innovative solutions, that are not necessarily based on material products, but are rather based on a mix of products and services (a Product Service System, or PSS).

In the last seven years I’ve been working on research and teaching activities focused on the design of such solutions and I believe it is is now the moment to put together the ideas and the findings from my research (my personal research, the discussions with my colleagues and the work with groups of very talented and enthusiastic students). It is now time to expose this knowledge to a wider audience and discuss it.

This blog will therefore include contributions from my teaching, research and theoretical activities. I will include my lectures (in the best possible form, maybe a podcast), my reflections and my doubts; and I hope to receive enough feedbacks (criticisms are more than welcome) to use this as a further opportunity to know more and possibly offer a contribution to this area of research.

In general my posts will concern:

• HOW? How do we design systemic solutions? How do we structure the design process of PSS? How do we manage the various methodological tools? How do we develop an operative paradigm?
• WHAT? What are those solutions? What do they imply for designers, industries, institutions or final users? What is an operative paradigm?
• WHY? Why should we focus our attention on systemic solutions? What are the ethical, professional and political imperative that suggest us to work in this area?

I hope visitors of this blog will find it interesting

Nicola Morelli