The Decentralization Turns in Design: An Exploration through the Maker Movement

Abstract

This article recollects paradigms and turns in the Design research and practice integrating several contributions and elaborates a new proposal arguing that the current changes are not about a single shift from one center to another, but rather the decentralization and distribution to several new centers becoming thus a system of Decentralization turns in Design. This system is structured with eight turns: Do It Yourself approaches to Design, Open Design, Network Science approach to Design, Distributed Manufacturing, Design and Locality, Design and Decolonization, Posthuman Design, Design, Data, Software and Artificial Intelligence. These eight turns are transforming design practice and research along eight dimensions (meta, who, what, where, how, tools, process, scale), here explored through the context of the Maker Movement