A Companion to Design Innovation

A thorough, international, and numerate counter-forecast to conventional accounts of the future of design

The Handbook of Design and Innovation Directions for the 2030s is an insightful and truly path-breaking examination of trends in design and their consequences for the third decade of this century. Deploying new and varied indicators of progress in design, this volume offers a daring narrative of what the future will hold for designers, products, and product users.

With contributions from specialists all over the world, this book offers evidence-based and historically informed analyses of international performance in design and innovation. Early chapters consider sectors, including manufacturing, transportation, stores, consumer finance, and public services, as well as skills, including Digital Design Modelling, office design, fashion design and forecasting, wayfinding systems, design for voice input and output, and the intellectual property bound up with design. Separate chapters cover the future of design in China, Japan, India, South Korea, and Russia, as well as issues across the African continent. Among the long-term challenges treated are corporate design departments, packaging, aging populations, healthcare, sustainable design, and design education.

Backed by clear statistics and revealing images, the collected chapters suggest what designers need to do in the wake of developments such as Covid, protectionism in world trade, and inflation. This new volume:

• Is written by an international team of specialist experts, including top practitioners and scholars in design
• Scrutinizes design from the perspectives of management, economics, sociology and technology
• Contains direct recommendations about what designers should do now, professionally, to prepare for the future
• Concludes each chapter with a range of likely scenarios for the 2030s

The Handbook of Design and Innovationis a bracing and controversial riposte to vague sentiment about ’design futures’. It is a primer in forecasting and strategy - at the level both of corporations and of national policymaking. Ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of design, it is also a must for companies interested in the real, not imagined prospects that now face marketing, R&D and business.