What Is the Right Amount of Design?

Most of the time when we write about design, we encounter it after the work has been done.

We know what a room feels like before we know why it feels that way.

The Design Research Society gives us a chance to move upstream. Its work asks what design is as a discipline: how decisions get made, what designers should control, what they should invite and what they should leave open.

The Society was founded in the United Kingdom in 1966. Its origins stretch back to the 1962 Conference on Design Methods at Imperial College London, where researchers and practitioners from engineering, architecture, industrial design, communications and other fields gathered around a relatively new proposition: the process of designing itself could be studied.

The Society’s original purpose was to promote “the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields.” It remains one of the longest-established multidisciplinary organizations devoted to design research.

This June, DRS2026 brought the Society’s biennial conference to Edinburgh. Researchers presented work across design philosophy, systems, politics and society, technology, education, materials, sustainability, aesthetics and other fields. The proceedings are publicly available through the Society’s digital library.

We spent time with them because they intersect with a question we keep asking from the other direction.

What is the right amount of design?

Not how much decoration. How much determination. How much choice should participants have?

How much of an experience should the designer decide, and how much should remain available to the person having it?

One of the most useful projects is called We Found Planet B.

Candela Guyot, an independent researcher based in Barcelona, and Victoria Rodriguez Schon of Politecnico di Milano’s Design Department developed the project through the School of Materialist Research’s exploration of nature and artifice. They began with the environmental slogan “There is no Planet B” and reversed it.

Their fictional premise imagines that another planet has been discovered and that humanity now has to reproduce Earth there under a deliberately absurd rule: if something looks the same, it is the same.

Participants encounter protocols for selecting the perfect rock, flower and stick. The installation turns classification itself into satire, asking what happens when design treats nature as something that can be completely identified, reproduced and controlled.

Then children took over the installation. They stopped treating the stage as a designed sequence to be followed and began using it as a place for free play. The researchers describe what emerged as an “ecology of gestures” beyond their original intention. Rather than treating that use as a failure of the installation, they incorporated it into the research: the unexpected behavior became evidence that the environment could host forms of participation they had not designed in advance.

The project was designed enough to create a world, but not so completely that an unexpected use could not emerge from it.

A second paper approaches the question through design education.

Azeem Hamid and Kristi Kuusk of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Umar Hameed of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Nithikul Nimkulrat of OCAD University worked with foundation-year design students in Lahore, Pakistan. Their question was what happens when the educator stops behaving as though all agency in a learning environment belongs to the educator.

The workshop replaced a conventional sequence of instruction with exercises in listening, movement and touch. Students learned by attending to their bodies, the materials they handled, the atmosphere around them and one another. The point was not simply to make a lesson more sensory. It was to distribute some of the authority to produce knowledge away from the person teaching it.

The researchers describe the result as a decentred design practice. The educator still creates the conditions for learning, but knowledge can also emerge through materials, collective experience, sensory attention and the relationships among participants.

That is a meaningful change in what the educator is designing.

The design is no longer only the lesson.

It is the environment in which a lesson can become something the educator did not completely author.

A third project moves from the classroom to a neighborhood.

Cristina Ampatzidou, Martijn de Waal and Linda Vlassenrood, all researchers at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, studied Huis van de Toekomst, a community space in a Rotterdam neighborhood moving from natural gas toward district heating.

The space hosts gatherings in which residents, artists, organizers and professionals work through what that transition might look like in practice. The researchers treated those gatherings almost like theater productions: Where does the event happen? Who is invited? How are people addressed? Who is treated as an expert, a resident, a representative or a guest?

They also worked with Huis van de Toekomst to build a digital visualization of its community. That prototype became a way for the organization to examine itself: whom it connected, whom it represented and where tensions existed between a community-led effort and the institutions around it.

Their recommendation is not to find the perfect participation format.

It is to create an open-ended process capable of learning from the people participating in it.

The three projects are doing very different things. One is speculative installation. One is education. One is community and institutional design.

What connects them is a question about where authority should sit.

There are things an environment should determine very clearly. Safety. Accessibility. Navigation. Basic function. A train platform should tell you where to stand. A hotel should make it possible to find your room. Furniture should support the person sitting in it.

The designer still chooses, selects materials, establishes constraints, determines access and makes decisions about what happens first.

But the final experience does not have to belong entirely to the person who designed it.

A lobby does not need to decide who will talk to whom. A store does not need to decide what someone will discover. A museum does not have to determine what every visitor should think. A creative environment can protect attention without deciding what its participants should make.

The distinction is between designing the outcome and designing the conditions.

DRS2026 is useful because it lets us watch people inside the discipline test that distinction rather than only encountering the finished environments afterward.