Design Engineering professors Sara Barquero, Luis Calabuig y Borja García will present their new prospectivity-based approach on design management

The international congress, organized by the Boston Design Management Institute (DMI), will take place in the London School of Fashion from 2 to 4 September under the heading ‘Design Management in an Era of Disruption’

The 19th DMI International Design Management Research Conference will receive representatives from 29 countries, and will host 14 workshops and 150 talks. The only Spanish university to send representatives to this international congress on design, hosted by the London College of Fashion from September 2nd to 4th, will be CEU Cardenal Herrera. Sara Barquero, Luis Calabuig and Borja García, all three professors in the Bachelor in Industrial Design Engineering, will present their new prospectivity-based approach on design management to researchers and professionals in design from around the world. The title of their talk will be ‘Construct the Future’.

Construct the Future

In the opinion of professors Sara Barquero, Luis Calabuig and Borja García, the change produced in the structures and dynamics of society at all levels –economic, political, social and cultural – have defined a new paradigm. These transformations have directly affected business organizations and, in turn, users and consumers. Design, understood as the development of products and services, and design management, the favorable way of performing this development, must find new methodologies that correspond to the requirements of business organizations, and, more importantly, establish connections to ‘new users’.

That is why design management, as CEU-UCH professors Barquero, Calabuig and García argue, must become a discipline of transverse operability where the designer acquires the role of professional catalyst between many other disciplines. Given the importance and the value that the user acquires in this new era, design management should move towards establishing a comprehensible code with the social sciences, and assume dynamics specific to the latter’s methodologies.

“Design should reach out to society, to the individual and his or her needs and expectations, and not merely for the challenge of incrementing the effectiveness and productivity of companies, but as an imperative in a new, more uncertain, complex and changing context,” professors Barquero, Calabuig and García claim at the DMI Conference.

Prospectivity as a tool

Prospectivity is a discipline that intends to resolve uncertainty through anticipation; anticipation that is strongly linked to the action that is implicit when defining any strategy, which is a fundamental value in design management. A new approach in design management must be to mark and view the possible futures, through prospectivity, in which new products and services will be inscribed. “To Construct the Future, a synonym for prospectivity, is the only way of designing the future,” conclude professors Barquero, Calabuig and García. “The symbiosis between prospectivity and design management can offer us solutions.”

Previous articleCEU-UCH receives 225 000 euros from Javea Cancer Care intended for clinical research in personalized treatments against cancer by the English Cathedra of Modern Oncology Research
Next articleCEU-UCH professor of Pharmacy Isabel Martínez Solís and SEPLAN research group, selected for Who’s Who in the World® 2015