Future Talks: Designing for Values

A look at how we can design with values and interesting tools that can help us design for values and reflect on our past designs.

The first of many future talks and todays class focussed on distributed design and how we can design with values. We had an open conversation of the values we associated with distributed design and then did an exercise reflecting on our past work using a new tool. 

Reflecting on my past practices

The main exercise of the talk was to reflect on my design practice using the reflection tree. This is a tool that worked to reflect on my practice and think of the impact my design has on multiple aspects. I found the tool especially handy thinking to the future and using it during the design process to double check if what you set out to do is actually happening in terms of values.

Key takeaways of the reflection tree

After completing the task in class I took some more time to let the method set in and really think of what I learned from this exercise. These were for me the main takeaways.

  • Designing for values should be taken into account throughout all stages of the design process. I feel this tool really showed me in which ways I can consider values in my design not only at the beginning. I feel that this could be really helpful in the future. 
  • There are different ways to implement value based design. For me this is interesting as there are so many different facades to the values and while I am quite good at implementing certain areas there are still areas I can improve in
  • Regenerative design can tackle multiple scales. Usually when I thought of regenerative design I really focussed on the environment but I failed to take into account regenerative on other scales such as society and value. These are points that I could look at in the future.

Reflecting on Future Talks Designing for Values

When I reflect on the talk and the tool there are a few things that pop up for me. considering the reflection tree I feel it is a tool with a lot of potential in the future. I found it interesting and nice to just refresh some thoughts of my design process and figure out where I am in relation to certain aspects. Considering the implementation for specific projects I feel this tool could be quite successful in opening new avenues in ones design process. I would definitely use this when I am at a block or want to quickly check how my design is doing compared to certain values. 

I would be interested to see this tool developed in such a way that a designer could start by choosing values that are essential to there design and then based on that the tool could focus on certain areas of the tree instead of all. As I think as a designer you sometimes make conscious choices to neglect one aspect so you can work harder on another. This way the tool could be even more useful towards specific projects. 

All in all, looking back at the future talk I found it a very nice way to start a conversation based on values and distributed design. I learned a lot from reflecting on my past practices by using the reflection tree and while somethings can still be optimized overall it is a very helpful tool. It helped me realize that there are certain values I sub-consciously implement based on restorative design and also in the future could be a check in my design process to ensure I am sticking to my main design values in a project.

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