The Extended Praxis of Design: Towards a Characterization of the Advanced Design Cultures

The praxis of design is becoming broader: it has been extending to both new practice territories and topics of interest, and moving from the development of new products to practices that approach new landscapes, such as the organizational, the social, and the territorial. These diverse practices can be understood under the paradigm of Advanced Design and require us to rethink the way we understand the discipline of design. This paper goes from the literature review analyzing the roots and sources of Advanced Design and its relation with future studies, towards the factors that these broader territories of design are stressing on its practices, with the objective of characterizing them. By so doing, we can shine a light on the phenomenon and analyze its modus operandi. This paper presents the notions of time, culture and process that can be used as a reference framework for the understanding of Advanced Design cultures and discusses the key points of these new approaches: these approaches act more on a strategic level in organizations and communities, creating new visions and paradigms, being more anticipatory, expanding the time horizon of the projects by including a longer-term perspective of goals.