Reconsidering Representation in College Design Curricula

The Future of Design Education working group on representation addressed the roles of data, maps, models, and interfaces as a continuum from representation to action. The article traces historical ideas of representation grounded by a linguistic paradigm to more recent approaches based on performance, embodiment, and sensory modalities other than vision. Discussions include the use of representations in the design process. Designers are able to use traditional forms of representation in the design of artifacts, such as sketches. These forms of representation are not sufficient for the design of systems. System design requires models that allow stakeholders to negotiate their view of a situation and design teams to iterate how things might work. Core ideas in the working group recommendations address issues of, substitution, formal rules, motivation, context dependency, materiality, provisionality, latency, performance, externalization, facilitation and negotiation, mediation, and measurement and evaluation. Discussions address the socio-political implications of representation and the expanding role of computing and data that call for a systems view.