Mauricio Mejía | Design ability, expertise, and mindset

In the November’s Engage with Ideas Mauricio Mejía talk titled Design ability, expertise, and mindset: How professionals and lay people engage in designing will reflect on his article published in 2023 titled From researching to making futures: a design mindset for transdisciplinary collaboration.

Mauricio’s talk will aim to explore how design expertise of professional designers, the design abilities of all humans, and the design mindset that other professionals can use in their practice and collaborative work. He will propose a conversation on how “designing” is an alternative social practice for restoring our full humanity.

In his talk, Mauricio will explore how increasingly algorithmised society is leading us to live in a world where data, analysis, evidence, and research are the drivers of practice. Although, humans enjoy and are encourage to use their imaginative mind when they are toddlers, as they enter the mainstream learning systems, from K-12 to college to organisational training, their imaginative mind gradually is suppressed. Unsurprisingly, for many going throughout this learning environment, AI tools that can process and manage data better than humans present an existential crisis for their practice.

Mauricio argues that pockets of high-quality design education and practice offer alternatives to recover imaginative practices. Nevertheless he suggests that currently this design expertise is only available to dedicated professionals. Therefore, he postulates that a design mindset which offers an alternative for non-professional practitioners and lay people to recover their imaginative abilities based on intuitive and concrete thinking might be able to address the current educational limitations. Mauricio will build on his article titled From researching to making futures: a design mindset for transdisciplinary collaboration (Mejía, Henriksen, Xie, García-Topete, Malina, & Jung, 2023) to propose how people can adopt a design mindset.

Mauricio Mejía is a Professor of Design at Arizona State University (ASU). His current work is about designing change and strategic design. He explores how professional designers can address complex situations and how other professionals use a design mindset. He often collaborates with practitioners and researchers in other fields, such as health, sustainability, business, and education. Dr. Mejía studies and works with diverse design practices and approaches such as design research, service design, experience design, collaborative design, and futures methods. At ASU, he established the Transformation Lab. He is one of the co-conveners of the Design Research Society special interest group Designing Change.

Reference

Mejía, G. M., Henriksen, D., Xie, Y., García-Topete, A., Malina, R. F., & Jung, K. (2023). From researching to making futures: a design mindset for transdisciplinary collaboration. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 48(1), 77-108. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2022.2131086