This paper considers the status of design research and underlines the importance of setting up clear objectives for doctoral programs within this discipline. For this reason, it compiles a list of key considerations in order to advance towards a consensus in respect to these type of academic programs.

Professional doctorates emerged in the 1990s in the United Kingdom and Australia as a response to a range of institutional pressures in mass higher education at the postgraduate level. Globally alternative doctoral programmes including (creative) project work have developed which purport to address professional and practice values in creative arts and industries, including design, more adequately than the traditional PhD. However, given the questionable ‘professional’ status of design as such, should institutions encourage such courses?

In the face of social problems of ever-increasing complexity, businesses have become interested in the thought process of designers, two important aspects of which focus on users and systems thinking. Business education, in turn, can benefit by adopting some of the concepts and methods designers learn. These include learning how to frame problems, conduct ethnographic research, reason abductively, synthesise information and collaborate in groups. Teaching methods need to be practically focused and reflective. As an example, a design course taught in an Austrian business school helped transform students’ perspectives.

The role of design in post-socialist countries still in transition to capitalism has changed dramatically over the last two decades. industrial decline has led to a social legitimacy crisis suffered by industrial designers, who had so far led the sector. Although new forms of designer identities have sporadically emerged, this legitimacy crisis is still apparent and clamours for a radical shift from the traditional image of designers to that of those who are acknowledging new and expanding roles for design. The global financial and economic crisis parallel to the ever-deepening general system crisis in Hungary is an acute reminder of this need.

Focusing on a specific case, the postgraduate course Product Service System Design taught in English to Italian and international students of the Design Faculty at Milan Polytechnic, the author reflects on the present and future of designers as “reflexive professionals” (to quote Donald A. Schön) called upon to act in uncertain and vaguely defined contexts, tackle problems in highly original ways and come up with wide-ranging, experimental and innovative solutions resorting to complex and hybrid techniques and tools either purposely designed or taken from other fields.

The article, based on a presentation made at Educating Designers for Global Citizenship, UWC Cardiff, in November 2005, questions the role of design and recognises its potential as a tool of social change beyond a profession intended to satisfy the needs of industrial production, beyond local-global considerations and from the context of a country like India. It argues that design schools must enable hybridization of different creative process and facilitate the development of a community social awareness.

v*i*d*a lab (2005-2008) was an experimental workshop for industrial design students at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (Colombia) which explored the conception of new objects for everyday life, taking as a point of departure trans-disciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of life. The present text sets out the chief reflections of the workshop, its exercises and general methodology, and some of the projects developed by the students.

This article presents an approach to user involvement that allows confronting the designer’s rationale with society’s motivations and values. This approach is specifically tailored for design processes aimed at societal transformation. In this approach, user involvement is considered as a constructive process, rather than a destructive process. More precisely, it is defined as a co-reflective session between designers and users that starts by sensitising to construct the user’s desired reality in order to confront it with the designer’s rationale.

It seems that society has got stuck in a position where user choices determine the way we are going to live in the future. The practice and education of engineers depends on short term effects rather than longer term social responsibilities. Culture is no more than a market, where politics is the façade and the city the setting. Rather than return to the old school of high quality engineering, or demand new intelligence from engineers we demand new forms of social engineering. Where will this lead to?