BE OPEN Academy

PART 1. From Surface Choice to Material Literacy

For a long time, materials in design education were often approached through appearance, function and technique. Students learned how paper folds, how wood joins, how textiles behave, how plastic can be moulded, how metal carries weight, or how digital renderings can imitate surface and texture. These skills remain essential. But the meaning of materials is changing.

Today, a material is not only a surface, structure or finish. It is a set of relationships: to extraction, labour, chemistry, energy, supply chains, repair, reuse, toxicity, carbon, local culture and future waste.

For design students, this means that material choice is becoming a form of responsibility. The future designer must learn not only how materials look and perform, but where they come from, what they contain, how they age, how they affect people and ecosystems, and what happens when the product is no longer new.

Material intelligence is therefore becoming a core part of design literacy. It connects craft with science, aesthetics with ethics, and making with systems thinking.

Material Is Never Neutral

Every material carries a story. Some stories are visible: colour, texture, weight, smell, touch. Others are hidden: the chemicals used in production, the energy required to process it, the conditions of workers, the distance it travelled, the difficulty of recycling it, or the harm it may cause when burned, buried or broken down.

Design students are trained to make choices. But the basis of those choices must expand. It is no longer enough to ask whether a material is beautiful, affordable or easy to use. Students must also ask whether it is safe, circular, repairable, locally appropriate and transparent.

The point is not to find a perfect material. The point is to learn how to ask better material questions.

BE OPEN Insight

The future of design will not be shaped only by new forms, but by new relationships with matter.

As environmental and health consequences become harder to ignore, students need to understand materials as active participants in design. They are not passive ingredients. They shape how people live, how systems function and how future waste or value is created.

From Selection to Investigation

Traditional material education often begins with selection: choosing from samples, catalogues or supplier lists. Future material education will need to begin earlier, with investigation. What is the material made from? What is mixed into it? Who produces it? How far does it travel? Can it be repaired? Can it be separated from other materials? Can it return safely to biological or technical cycles?

This investigative approach changes the studio. Students may still build models and prototypes, but they may also create material maps, ingredient lists, lifecycle sketches, disassembly tests and end-of-life scenarios. They may compare not only how materials behave in the hand, but how they behave in a system.

Case Study: Materiom and the Rise of Bio-Based Experimentation

Materiom is a platform that supports the development of next-generation bio-based materials through open data and AI. Its work highlights a broader shift in design: material innovation is no longer limited to industrial laboratories. Designers, scientists, makers and producers can experiment with ingredients, recipes and performance data to explore new possibilities.

For students, bio-based experimentation can be especially valuable because it makes material systems visible. A material made from algae, mycelium, agricultural waste or natural binders reveals relationships between biology, chemistry, locality, performance and decay.

This kind of learning encourages students to ask practical questions. How strong is the material? How does it respond to moisture? Is it scalable? Is it compostable only under specific conditions? What additives are needed? Does it truly replace a harmful material, or does it introduce a different problem?

Source:
https://www.materiom.org

Learning Through Making

Material intelligence cannot be learned only from reading. Students need to cut, bend, break, join, stain, repair, test and disassemble. They need to see how materials fail. A material that looks elegant in a rendering may crack, warp, scratch, smell, fade or become impossible to separate from another component.

Material literacy is therefore not nostalgic craft. It is a future skill.

PART 2. From Collaboration to Shared Responsibility

Designing With, Not Only For

One of the most important shifts in contemporary design is the movement from designing for people to designing with them. Designing for can be generous, but it can also become paternalistic. It assumes that designers can fully understand someone else’s needs from the outside. Designing with begins from a different position: people affected by a design should have a voice in shaping it.

This is especially important when students work on social, cultural or environmental topics. A project about a neighbourhood, school, disability experience, migrant community or climate-affected region cannot be treated as an abstract brief. It requires care, humility and consent. It requires students to ask who is represented, who is missing and who has the power to define success.

Human-centred design methods help students learn from people through interviews, observation, prototyping and feedback. But the goal is not simply to extract insights. The goal is to build respectful relationships and create work that can be tested, questioned and improved by the people it concerns.

Source:
https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design.html

Case Study: MIT D-Lab and Creative Capacity Building

MIT D-Lab’s Creative Capacity Building methodology promotes community-driven innovation. Its approach is based on the belief that people can be active creators of technology, not only passive recipients of solutions designed elsewhere. Through hands-on learning, communities develop the skills and confidence to design solutions to challenges they face.

The idea is highly relevant for design education. It shows that collaboration is not only about bringing users into a feedback session after a concept is nearly finished. It can mean sharing tools, building capability and recognising local knowledge as a source of innovation.

MIT D-Lab’s Co-Design Summits also bring diverse actors together to understand complex challenges and co-create prototypes. For students, this offers a different model of the studio: one where the designer is not the only expert, and where the value of the project includes the relationships and capacities built along the way.

Sources:
https://d-lab.mit.edu/approach/creative-capacity-building-ccb
https://d-lab.mit.edu/approach/co-design-summits

Feedback as a Design Skill

Collaboration depends on feedback, but students are not always taught how to give and receive it well. Critique can easily become personal, vague or defensive. In the future studio, feedback must become a design skill: specific, generous, honest and connected to the aims of the project.

This matters because collaborative design often involves disagreement. Different stakeholders may value different outcomes. A business partner may prioritise speed. A community group may prioritise trust. A sustainability expert may prioritise long-term impact. A designer must be able to hold these tensions without reducing them too quickly.

AI and the Collaborative Studio

Artificial intelligence adds another layer to collaboration. AI tools can help teams generate options, summarise research, visualise alternatives or compare scenarios. But they can also create confusion if teams do not agree how AI will be used, documented and evaluated.

In the collaborative studio, AI should not replace shared thinking. It should support it. Students may use AI to widen exploration, but they still need to decide which ideas are meaningful, which assumptions are problematic and which choices remain under human control. The more tools enter the process, the more important it becomes to clarify authorship and responsibility.

A future group project might include not only a design outcome, but also a collaboration map: who contributed what, where AI was used, how decisions were made and what ethical questions emerged. This kind of transparency can make collaborative work more credible.

How Portfolios Can Show Collaboration

If collaboration becomes central to design practice, portfolios will need to show it more clearly. Students often struggle to present group work because they fear their individual contribution will be unclear. The solution is not to hide collaboration, but to document it intelligently.

A strong portfolio can explain the team structure, the student’s specific role, the shared process, the moments of conflict or change, and the final contribution. It can show facilitation tools, stakeholder maps, meeting notes, prototypes, feedback sessions and reflections on what was learned from others.

What Design Schools Can Teach

Design schools can prepare students for collaborative practice by creating assignments that require more than group production: work with external partners, rotating leadership, testing with users and reflection on responsibility.

Key Takeaways for Design Students

• Treat collaboration as a design skill, not an administrative requirement.
• Learn to listen before trying to solve.
• Work with communities and stakeholders respectfully.
• Document roles, decisions, feedback and changes in direction.
• Make disagreement productive rather than personal.
• Use AI tools to support shared thinking, not to replace it.
• Show your contribution to team projects clearly in your portfolio.
• Remember that facilitation, communication and trust-building are creative acts.
• Understand that complex problems need many forms of intelligence.
• Move from designing for people to designing with them.

Looking Ahead

The future design studio will not be a room where individual talent competes for attention. It will be a space where different forms of knowledge meet: human experience, technical expertise, cultural memory, environmental awareness, business reality and creative imagination.

For students, this is an opportunity. Collaboration does not make the designer less important. It makes the designer’s role more demanding and more valuable. The designer becomes a facilitator of possibility, a translator between worlds and a guardian of meaning.

In a world of complex challenges, the strongest design work will not always come from the loudest individual voice. It will come from the clearest shared understanding.

PART 1. From Individual Talent to Collaborative Intelligence

Design education has often celebrated individual vision: the student with a distinctive style, the strong personal portfolio, the final project that appears to carry a single creative signature. Individual talent still matters. Designers need imagination, craft, curiosity and confidence. But the conditions in which design now operates are changing. The most important problems are no longer solved by talent alone.

Climate adaptation, public health, digital trust, inclusive mobility, ageing populations, circular systems and responsible AI all require more than a beautiful object or a clever interface. They require many forms of knowledge: technical, social, environmental, cultural and economic. They require designers to work with engineers, researchers, communities, policymakers, educators, scientists, clients and sometimes intelligent tools.

For design students, this means that collaboration is no longer a soft skill placed at the edge of the curriculum. It is becoming a core design competence. The studio of the future will not only ask students what they can make. It will ask how they listen, negotiate, share responsibility, build trust, combine perspectives and turn disagreement into stronger work.

The End of the Solitary Genius

The image of the designer as a solitary genius has always been incomplete. Even the most iconic projects usually depend on teams, suppliers, teachers, technicians, users, commissioners and social conditions that make the work possible. Yet design education has often presented authorship as something singular: one name, one portfolio, one final outcome.

That model is becoming harder to sustain. A student designing a care service, sustainable package or AI-assisted product cannot rely only on personal intuition. They need to understand users, systems, materials, technology, ethics and context.

BE OPEN Insight

The future designer will not be defined only by individual brilliance, but by the ability to create intelligence between people.

As design challenges become more complex, collaboration becomes a creative material in its own right. Students who learn how to listen, translate, facilitate and build shared understanding will be better prepared to design solutions that are not only original, but useful, ethical and resilient.

Why Complex Problems Need Many Voices

Simple problems can sometimes be solved by one expert. Complex problems cannot. They involve many actors, hidden causes, competing needs and unintended consequences. A transport solution may affect air quality, street safety, local businesses, accessibility and social behaviour. A digital product may affect privacy, attention, mental health and exclusion. A new material may reduce carbon but create problems of toxicity, sourcing or end-of-life processing.

This is why systems thinking is becoming part of design education. Students need to understand relationships, not only objects. They need to map stakeholders, identify feedback loops, recognise trade-offs and see how one intervention can change a wider system.

Collaboration is not simply a way to divide labour. It is a way to see more clearly. Different people notice different risks, opportunities and assumptions. A community member may understand a problem that a designer cannot see from the outside. An engineer may reveal a technical constraint that changes the concept. A sustainability expert may identify a hidden environmental cost. A user may challenge the brief itself.

When collaboration works well, the final design is not a compromise that dilutes creativity. It is a richer outcome shaped by more complete understanding.

Case Study: Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework

Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework was developed to help designers work on major complex challenges involving people across different disciplines and sectors. It expands design practice beyond a linear process and asks designers to consider systems, relationships and long-term consequences.

For students, the lesson is important. If the challenge is systemic, the studio cannot be closed. It must become a place where research, participation, experimentation and reflection connect. A systemic design project may include mapping relationships, testing assumptions, engaging stakeholders, identifying leverage points and considering what happens after the design leaves the classroom.

Source:
https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/systemic-design-framework/

From Teamwork to Collaboration Literacy

Many students have worked in groups, but group work is not the same as collaboration. A group can divide tasks without building shared understanding. One person may research, another may make visuals, another may present. The result may be efficient, but not necessarily collaborative.

Collaboration literacy means something deeper. It is the ability to create conditions in which different people can contribute meaningfully. It includes setting shared goals, agreeing roles, documenting decisions, giving feedback, resolving conflict and recognising invisible labour. It also includes knowing when to lead and when to step back.

Design schools can teach this through studio formats that make process visible. Students can be asked to document how decisions were made, how feedback changed the project, how responsibilities were shared and how disagreements were handled. Peer critique can become not only a judgment of final outputs, but a way to learn how to think with others.