Definition of Developmental Design

What is Developmental Design?

Everything is designed, which is to say everything comes into being via a process, stays in existence via other processes, and transforms into other things via other processes. Most of these forms of design emerge spontaneously – autopoetically. Most of reality is designed—but without a designer. This is true both in non-human contexts and human contexts.

Based upon an understanding that change comes in two forms: change-in-degree and change-in-kind, we can also loosely categorize design in a similar manner: Developmental Design and Disruptive Design. Developmental Design encompasses all of the processes involved in incremental, quantitative forms of change. While Disruptive Design encompasses qualitative forms of change making. 

As a category, Developmental Design is what by and large almost all design processes are engaged in. Design Thinking, user-centered design, brainstorming, etc.—these are all processes best suited to incremental forms of change-making. 

It is important to name these approaches as Developmental Design to make it clear that these approaches do not encompass all of design or all of creativity. 

Approaches to creativity cannot limit themselves to Developmental Design practices, for in doing so they limit themselves to only engaging in changes-in-degree while never properly engaging with change-in-kind—the radically different and new. For this, we need the diverse practices of Disruptive Design.

See: Change, Design, Design Thinking

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