Follow up on Guest Speaker

During the guest lecture on Thursday, I raised concern over the method used as an alternative to a user story, what she called a job story. My concern was that she was introducing a tool that established a cause and effect narrative for any design paradigm that had three components, context, motivation, and outcome. My qualms stemmed from the fact that this establishes a over arching narrative that utilizes the market as the driving force of the design process, maybe I am reading into it too hard, but her example didn't help.

I did some futher reading on the subject, since much of the design field revolves around this unspoken or sometimes addressed narrative, that the market drives both design and innovation.

I found this research paper that examined the impact of the recession of 2008 on the design field and the collapse of market driven design during that time. It goes on to explore means of combating this reliance on the entrepreneurial class and the traditional role of "customers".

The cross over from italian is a little jilted but here is a segment of the abstract:

"Design has recently responded to this new situation by generating new working methods. Politecnico di Torino has evolved its classic demanding approach to design and brought it up to date by incorporating “explorative” capacities into the training of its students, providing them with the necessary skills to cope with an absence of market, proposing the designer as a key figure capable of exploring existing situations and off ering new solutions."

Full Text