Hot off the press! Delft Design Guide 2.0
The second edition of the Delft Design Guide is available now. This essential reference manual for design methods - many of which are developed, taught and used at TU Delft’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering – is back from the printers and available in the Netherlands first, ahead of it going on sale internationally on March 30 2020.
New content, new understandings
Containing 33 % new content and 110 new pages, this revised and extended Delft Design Guide presents perspectives, models, approaches and methods essential for a designer’s toolbox. Each of the 70 methods is presented in practical one-pages texts, enriched with a page of diagrams and images of example applications, stimulating further exploration and reflection. In the words of the guide, it is intended to “help you to understand how a designer thinks, what a designer does and how this is done, the Delft way.”
International success story
With the first edition having sold in excess of 11,000 copies and having been adopted by numerous academic institutions and design practices internationally; the second edition of the book has been created in response to a need for a more comprehensive overview of methods at a time of rapid change. Design is shifting its focus from products and individual users to what the authors refer to as a “zoomed-out level in which products and individuals are part of a larger system. […]There is also more attention on the effect of design on environment, and society: the raison d’être of design. Design therefore becomes increasingly complex and requires new or adapted working methods.”
Editors and authors with roots in Delft
The new Delft Design Guide was edited and partly written by Annemiek van Boeijen, Assistant Professor in Design, Culture & Society at the faculty of IDE; Jaap Daalhuizen, Associate Professor in Design Methodology at the Technical University of Denmark (and TU Delft alumnus); and Jelle Zijlstra, industrial designer, head of the Motion department at the Design Academy Eindhoven and teacher of Design Didactics at TU Delft.
The authors worked closely with more than 70 contributors from TU Delft’s Faculty of IDE , where design methods are both central to the master’s and bachelor’s curriculum and an important output of the faculty’s team of design researchers.
Design methods: a defining feature of Delft Design
This method-led, rational approach to design has been a feature of Delft Design since the faculty was established in 1969. Indeed, IDE’s first graduate, Norbert Roozenburg, went on to pen a much-cited book, together with the late Professor Johannes Eekels: “Product Design: Fundamentals and Methods”.
Nonetheless, in the foreword he has written for the new Delft Design Guide, he notes: “methods were never uncontroversial. The Dutch writer Godfried Bomans asserted: ‘In the realm of the mind a method is comparable to a crutch; the true thinker walks freely.’ ” Roozenburg continues: “Despite criticism and doubt […] methods have not disappeared from the scene. Methods are often used as means of teaching design. The development of better methods is probably the most important driver of design research.”
For a deep dive into design methods, their development and their importance today, including a conversation with author/editor of the Delft Design Guide, Annemiek van Boeijen, take a listen to this podcast. Created, as part of course material for IDE’s Design Theory & Methodology course, Peter Lloyd, Professor of Integrated Design Methodology and Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, Associate Professor of Social Innovation, lead the conversation on the history of design methods.