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Quotations by ds21 researchers

Karen Blincoe, 2005

‘’We must learn to co-operate, create communities where spaces and services are pooled, where local resources and skills are developed, creating self-managed services for the children, the elderly, the disabled and the sick. We must work towards a generation of new types of communities.’

Andrew Carmichael, 2005

‘What I’m interested in is being able to rapidly prototype projects using people who have very different bits of knowledge, some kind of way that knowledge can be made manifest. What I’m looking for is to develop a more practical tool, partly because I sit in so many meetings where people are thinking about totally different things and the interesting ideas that come up get lost.’

Caroline Davey, 2005

We would suggest that the search for appropriate adaptability, rather than that for static design ‘perfection’ should be at the heart of sustainable design. Design adaptability should take into account current economic, social and environment priorities, but recognise that these priorities may change in the future. Thus, for real sustainability, a design solution that meets the sustainability priorities of today must be adaptable to meet those of the future—or face demolition.

Richard Douthwaite, 2005

I am particularly interested in exploring potential synergies between a community’s need for an energy supply and its need for a system which enables one person to exchange his or her personal energies and abilities for those of other members of the community – in other words, a community money system. And I’m interested in that, in turn, because I want to empower communities to become more self-reliant – to do more for themselves than they generally do at present – because I believe the world economy is fundamentally unstable and that communities that obtain their money supply and energy from outside will be very badly affected when it crashes.’

Bill Dunster, 2005

‘I think what’s not really working at the moment is that there isn’t evidence of an alternative and viable concept coming through. It’s just a series of micro-initiatives that don’t add up to very much, especially when presented to the general public. So if the design synergy project really works, it will take all of these ideas, join them up, link them together and create a really big picture that in theory is a workable alternative to the status quo.’

Naomi Gornick, 2005

Dynamic flexible individuals are required for new design-based roles in industry and consultancy to deal with the rapidly changing arenas of commerce, politics, legislation and society and the changing demands of both individual users and user groups. There is requirement therefore for enlarged sets of skills and abilities and new kinds of knowledge and knowledge processes.’

Milan Jaros, 2005

‘The meta-designer is the model of a future knowledge worker – a system interrogator, facilitator of living places, animator of modes of individuation; a narratologist of personalised pathways of life activities, bodily event manager.’

Hannah Jones, 2005

‘A more implicate design will endeavor to understand as many relations as possible to unfold as holistic a solution as possible. Implicate design relies on an ensemble, a whole outfit of professionals brought together by necessity, optimism and creative curiosity to transform awkward current social and environmental challenges into positive solutions for our futures.’

Phil Jones, 2005

‘We designed our cities to make people as mobile as possible. We should be designing to make things as accessible as possible for people to get to.’

Vadim Kvitach, 2005

The activity we have today will become a practice; we need to make our activity practical. ‘man is a toolmaker’; we should see ourselves as toolmakers and make different synergetic tools to make something very practical and useful.’

Otto Van Nieuwenhuize, 2005

‘Space, time, energy and consciousness come together – always have these four together. Working in synergy, pulling together ideas from different disciplines makes you rethink how you work.’

Jan-Marc Petroschka, 2005

‘I think that in order to develop a theory you need a subject. If we speak about the bottle of water that’s enough of a subject potentially based on that one thing we can develop philosophies, what is a bottle? You can think about redesigning it.’

John Wood, 2005

'Synergy might have a longer lifeline than sustainability.’

Martin Woolley, 2005

‘It is interesting to be able to see my own skills in a new disciplinary context. I think part of the problem when you’ve talked about interdisciplinary work in design is that you tend to fall very quickly into a stereotypical view of what the other disciplines might be and it’s always a variation on science, engineering, psychology and cultural studies but there are people in the cluster that go way beyond those traditional boundaries.’

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