Innovation vs competence deactualization in design-practice and design-education

Abstract

The achievements of modern high technologies show incredible results that bring additional benefits to society and radically change all spheres of life. However, the rapid development of high technology contains certain risks. In the discourse of disruptive selection, innovative technologies supplant traditional scenarios, which sometimes leads to the deactivation of competences and even specializations.

Technological changes require updating the composition and increasing the level of professional competence. In the design, which is innovative in its nature of activity and mediator in the “man-society-reality-nature” ecosystem, this effect is especially obvious. The transition period between the third and fourth industrial revolutions, which called the "digital revolution," requires from designer so-called "digital competencies", which are relevant to both everyday domestic, so, social and professional aspects. The next period of social transformations, which is associated with the Fourth industrial revolution, can be characterized as post-digital. It characterized by the fact that digital competencies have penetrated into all spheres of society. In the post-digital period, which is built on the digitalization platform, advances in high technology are accompanied by disruptive changes in the structure of labor.

Substantiation of relevance. Disruptive technologies carried the threat to degradation for many traditional professions, including different design directions, by means of implementing new approaches to solving problems, which stimulate the disruptive exchange the traditional to innovative. Understanding the role, spectrum and development trends of actual digital competencies is very important for the sustainable development of design in a digital environment.

Objectives and tasks. The article is devoted to the actual problem of analyzing the features of design creativity evolution, taking into account the influence of disruptive technologies in the period of digitization and in the post-digital period. The purpose of this study is to analyze how new generation designers adapt to working conditions in a digital environment of Forth industrial revolutions

Methods. To find the framework of the development concept of the digital design, the system approach was applied. The historiographical analysis of the transformation of the tools of design creativity under the influence of digitalization was carried out.

Results 31It is shown that in the course of industrial revolutions, the design culture under the influence of disruptive technologies passed several bifurcation points. In a result of this, a new design was replenished with new tools and new directions, and a category of new-generation designers able to work effectively in the digital environment was formed.

Novelty of findings. Based on the analysis of the main tasks of new generation designer’s activity, the formulation of the design progress concept was proposed with forming recommendations for the adaptation designers to work in the digital environment and formulating ways to modernize the models of training new generation designers.

Conclusions. It was concluded that for the sustainable development of design and the prevention of the devaluation of the axiological orientations of design creativity in design practice, an innovative orientation towards disruptive technologies is needed. The main thesis of the concept for the design development of digital and post-digital periods was proposed: “Innovations vs the deactualization of competences in design practice and design education. Go to meet of disruptive technologies by means of reengineering of project culture and updating competencies.”

The forecast of further researches perspective directions. Further research should be directed to detailing the composition of the actual competencies of digital design and the organization of new models of design education.