Cenários de design: a construção de visões de futuros a partir de redes e sistemas

Abstract

Design can be understood as a way to build future worlds, to imagine what no one has previously thought. Strategic Design, more specifically, deals with the uncertainties inherent to the construction of future worlds and this can be associated with the concept of scenarios. Design scenarios can be defined as a form of metaprojective thinking that operates with the uncertainty of problems with a high degree of complexity, in contexts of fast transformations, promoting a level shift that opens the possibility of critical reflection on the project. This research is interested in investigating networks and systems as structuring elements of design scenarios. Structure means the components and relationships that configure something. This structure is organic, as its components are not fixed and the relationships between them change continuously. The concept of network is understood as the integrated set of interdependent elements of a situation. Meanwhile, system is a grouping of networks that connect and establish relationships to each other, where the network is the pattern of organization. This organization concerns the relationships and processes that occur between the components of the system. Thus, the objective of this research is to identify methodological indications for the construction of networks and systems as a strategy to sustain design scenarios. In order to reach this objective, the method was divided in two stages: the first one concerns the literature review and interviews with experts in construction of future scenarios, while the second stage is an action research in which workshops were taken place for the construction of networks of attributes and, from them, the future scenarios. This sought to understand if it is possible to imagine scenarios from a systemic view and identified that another methodological approach is feasible in which the network acts as a structuring element instead of the polarity graph. In this systemic approach, there is a strong tendency to work with a notion of the whole, in which the network and the scenario are intertwined so that there are no well-defined steps in the construction of the design scenarios.