The Design Society

Abstract

There has been significant European interest in design research and education over many years, with particularly strong research traditions especially in the ‘design science/theory of technical systems’ movement in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and the Czech Republic in the second half of the 20th century and in the “design methods” movement that started in the UK in the 1960s. This interest led to the first International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED) being held in Rome in 1981, and in the early eighties to the Workshop Design Konstruktion (WDK) organization being established under the inspiration of Vladimir Hubka of Swiss Federal Technical University (ETH) in Zürich, supported by Mogens Andreasen of the Technical University of Denmark and Umberto Pighini of the University of Rome. WDK and ICED were instrumental in contributing to a flourishing in design research in the last two decades of the 20th century, with conferences held in different European locations every 2 years (with one foray across the Atlantic to Boston in 1987), culminating in more than 600 people meeting in Munich in August 1999 and with active programmes of design research in many European countries.