Half Cadence: Towards Integrative Design

Abstract

This paper projects an alternative vision of integrated design that is more open, fluid, pliable, and opportunistic in its search of collaborative alliances and agendas. This alternative approach is referred to as integrative design, in which methods, processes, and techniques are discovered, appropriated, adapted, and altered from “elsewhere.” The designers who engage design as a broadly integrative endeavor fluidly navigate across different disciplinary territories, and deploy algorithmic thinking, biomimicry, computation, digital fabrication, material exploration, and/or performance analyses to discover and create a process, technique, or a product that is qualitatively new.