The idea of Metadesign - Introduction

An edited transcript from his talk at the colloquium on metadesign on 28th June 2007

By John Wood

"How can we create another kind of design that will go beyond what the present design profession does and how can we educate for that? How can we transform the world into the kind of world that will survive in some shape that we like?
It’s a proposition that design is relational, and how relations work is something again that may come up over the next two days. How can we design for relations or design from within relations? The spirit of the two days is that people can think about things. We don’t necessarily want prepared answers to difficult questions, but thinking aloud is OK.
Everybody is aware of the problems, or “the problem,” but we are trying to find a way that doesn’t start from the negative. So, looking for opportunities and possibilities. One of the problems is that designers are trained, still trained, quite a lot, to be specialists, so we need to integrate many different levels and many different types of expertise, and many different people in order to create a common outcome which is beneficial."

(Clive Dilnot remarks:)
I think that what we are actually talking about here is a design which is much much more permeable to its social and economic context. Designers have had an extraordinary range of implicit capacities, most of which, from most of the history of modern design, we have manifested into products which then become the emblems of those capacities. Now I think what we are coming to learn for this century is how do we take some of those capacities and naturally generalise them out, at larger and larger scales.

(Richard Douthwaite remarks:)
How do metadesigners intervene in those systems and what tools do they use.

Metadesign is not just something that does its job, it must work at an emotional level (John Wood)