Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2022

This editorial highlights the range of approaches within this issue of the journal, many of which allude to the importance of writing and language within metadesigning. In emphasizing their combined importance for mankind’s survival in the Anthropocene it also discusses the need for a better learning framework within higher education.

Tackling complex social justice and sustainability challenges through design calls for a more comprehensive understanding of a design context. This involves encouraging designers and non-designers alike to work together to recognise the implications of designing ‘beyond a product’. This article explores what this approach might entail, reflecting upon the development of a design tool called the ‘Intersectional Design Cards’. This card-based design activity has been created to address multiple, interacting social and environmental inequities and inequalities, largely in the designing of emerging technologies in Silicon Valley. The cards have been made primarily for professional design and technology teams and start-up companies – but could also be used in other educational or social innovation contexts. They have been produced by team researchers, educators and practitioners who teach together on the ‘Innovations in Inclusive Design’, spring quarterly, ten-week class, at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), Stanford University, the United States. The article reflects upon how writing and mapping have played a part in integrating intersectionality research and design thinking, and shares examples of how the cards have been prototyped and tested with students, to develop intersectional design concepts across four levels of designing.

This article looks at how language can be used in metadesign approaches, processes and tools to foster empathic and considerate design teams. Metadesign places a strong emphasis on language as a tool for designing and communicating. It draws upon my doctoral thesis that considers a range of approaches to co-writing, and our forthcoming book, Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene, which offers a range of perspectives regarding what metadesign teams can and should do to foster change now we have reached this existentially precipitous point in human history. The slow languaging approaches, processes and tools described here are used within my workshops with interdisciplinary teams.

This case study analyses the role that writing and verbal communication plays when using objects in the collaborative metadesign process. It is common for co-design practices to be introduced in the ideation and other early stages of the design process. In these processes achieving consensus among participants may be critically important. Our research shows that an appropriate physical object can help not only in the initial phase of the process but also in the later stages of designing and production. In this article, we focused on the co-design process carried out by a Japanese craftsman and a group of designers and explored how the artefacts created along the way affected the process of communication. By examining misunderstandings and consensus between the participants, we learnt more about the possible role of objects in bridging the different viewpoints. The results of this study will contribute to the active introduction of metadesign methods in later design phases and, thus, improve the inclusiveness within metadesign projects.