RULE 43

The consciousness of the need to attend to content and context in order to plan effective design responses pushes designers to reconsider their knowledge, their tools, and their ways of working. The very notion of the object of design needs reassessment: we used to design objects, but now we have to think more about activities, the activities that people engage in, sometimes as a result of the objects and services we design. The commercial push for innovation calls for methods to evaluate the possible futures that these innovations could bring. New conceptual tools are required. The tools required must always place people at the center, sometimes observing them from very close quarters, sometimes bringing them into the design development loop.