Digital Design Manifesto
The building industry and its history offer a nice analogy. The increasing complexity of construction projects has led to the fact that the construction industry has established specialized professions in addition to the various trades with architects and civil engineers, who devote themselves to essential sub-tasks of construction and at the same time keep the construction as the overall goal in mind.
In our opinion, the increasing importance and complexity of digitization means that the IT industry has to take an evolutionary step comparable to the construction industry. It's not about establishing the one “superprofession”. We want to develop dedicated professions for digitization that, as team players, take on essential subtasks while at the same time not losing sight of the overall picture.
If you share this point of view and want to support our cause, we look forward to your signature under our manifesto!
How it all started...
The story of this manifesto begins at a Bitkom working group meeting on the subject of roles in software development in June 2016. The starting point for this meeting was the idea that we have an unmanageable number of role profiles for a wide variety of tasks in the IT world. These many profiles impede collaboration through numerous handovers and unclear responsibilities. A holistic view, as required for digitization and digital transformation, is hardly feasible. Our conclusion was that clearly defined and holistically operating job descriptions are needed, as they are common in other industries.
Software Careers Poster
A first result of the discussions at this event is this advertising poster for software jobs (www.erlebe-it.de software-berufe) with the three main job descriptions "designer", "engineer" and "manager".
Founding of the Taskforce Software Designer / Event Design meets IT
In particular, the term "designer" then caused a certain stir and interest. In November 2016, Bitkom therefore founded the Task Force Software Designers to further shed light on the topic. In addition to many substantive discussions, the "Design meets IT" event was the absolute highlight of the task force's work (https://www.bitkom. org/designmeetsit/). On this day, a good 180 participants discussed approaches, procedures and methods from media, product and industrial design and addressed the question "What can the IT industry learn from designers".
Guideline role ideal “digital design”
As a result of the task force software designers, the guide to the role ideal "Digital Design" was finally published in November 2017. The emphasis is primarily on the ideal. The digital designer should serve as a model for the further development of existing roles. Therefore, the development of the guide was also based on the existing roles. He justifies the necessity of digital design as a leading design profession for digitization and characterizes the range of competences of the digital designer with two focal points (design and material science for digitization) as well as a diverse cross-sectional competence. We chose the Pi symbol as the symbol for this dual focus profile, hence the Pi on the cover sheet.
The media response to Bitkom's press release on the guidelines was overwhelming. Various media took up the Digital Designer, including Heise, Computerwoche and CIO-Magazine. The feedback on the Digital Designer at various conference presentations was also phenomenal.
Founding of the Digital Design Working Group / Digital Design Manifesto
It seemed as if the digital designer had struck a chord. Therefore, in September 2018, the Bitkom "Software Designer" task force became the Digital Design working group. Its home is here https://www.bitkom.org/digitaldesign/
The working group is dedicated to the task of promoting the establishment of digital design as a design profession of digitization. The first tangible result is the Digital Design Manifesto on this website.
Three yearss after publication in September 2018, over 440 signatures have been put under the manifesto. Whether this is an impressive number, we cannot say. In any case, we are overwhelmed by the wide variety of reactions from different domains and the attention that the Digital Design Manifesto is still receiving three years later. It is therefore time to continue the story at this point in order to document the course of our initiative.
Public presentation of the Digital Design Manifesto through the “IT needs Design” event
After the publication of the manifesto in September 2018, the IT needs Design event took place in November 2018. At this event, the manifesto was presented to the public, framed by various lectures from the field of digital design.
Public presentation of the digital design manifesto at the event "IT needs design"
The presentation of the manifesto, including the symbolic handover to representatives from industry, research and politics, was recorded on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVSOhCFNGE8
Workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau "Understanding digital as a material"
The ideas of the State Bauhaus were a central source of inspiration for the Digital Design Manifesto. So it made sense to go to the Bauhaus as part of the work on digital design. In March 2019, a workshop on the topic "Digital as Material" took place with invited experts at the Bauhaus Dessau and with the participation of representatives of the Bauhaus.
Publication of the anthology Digital Design @Bauhaus
The workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau was extremely productive and discussed many different aspects of digital design - quite controversially. In order to create something lasting from this workshop, all participants in the workshop shared their thoughts and insights from the workshop in Collection "Digital Design @Bauhaus" summarized. The anthology was published in August 2019.
The anthology is freely available and can be downloaded here: https://www.bitkom.org/Bitkom/Publikationen/Digital-Design-Bauhaus anthology
Position paper "Digital Bauhaus for a European way into the digital future"
The workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau once again clearly showed how important the ideas of the Bauhaus were for digital design. In particular, it has become clear that new approaches to training in digital design are needed. Just as the Bauhaus developed a new training for designers and architects more than 100 years ago, we came to the conclusion that this is also necessary for digital design. What could be more obvious than to develop the idea of ??a digital Bauhaus in the Digital Design working group. As a result of this work, the position paper "Digital Bauhaus for a European way into the digital future" was published in September 2019.
The paper can be downloaded here:
https://www.bitkom.org/Bitkom/Publikationen/Digitale-Bauhaeuser-fuer-den-europaeischen-weg-in-die-digitale-Zukunft.
In addition, Bitkom conducted a discussion with invited guests on the idea of the digital Bauhaus. A recording of this panel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOWVVH5TTXI
Digital Design Yearbook 2021
The year 2020 was marked in all respects by the corona pandemic. Working group meetings and events have been completely relocated to digital space. However, this circumstance did not detract from the digital design initiative. Various aspects of digital design were discussed in intensive sessions and new friends and allies were also found online.
The main result of the content-related work was the Digital Design Yearbook 2021. The yearbook aims to present the current developments, thoughts and events relating to digital design collect and conserve.
The yearbook is available for free and can be downloaded here:
https://www.bitkom.org/Themen/Digital-Design-Yearbook-2021
New initiative - www.digitalisierungsberufe.de
In addition to the content-related work, political work has also made great progress despite Corona. Digital design as a profession is an important building block, but only one with a view to the job profiles of digitization. Not only the design has to be rethought against the background of digitization, all other trades of digitization also have to develop further.
Together with various associations, Bitkom has published the cross-association position paper "Successful digitization needs independent job profiles". In addition to establishing digital design as a job profile, it also calls for the promotion of the equally important job profiles of digital engineer and data scientist.
The position paper and all partners can be viewed here: www.digitalisierungsberufe.de
We are partners in the New European Bauhaus
The announcement of the initiative "New European Bauhaus" by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has spread through Europe like wildfire. The Digital Design working group was also more than fascinated by this project. Our idea of ??the digital Bauhaus is in the immediate vicinity of the New European Bauhaus. So what could be more obvious than an application as a partner.
In June 2021, Bitkom was accepted as a partner of the initiative:
https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/partners-0/partners_en
Digital Design Professional
The idea of digital design was not only promoted at Bitkom. Various companies and associations have taken up the idea for themselves. The International Requirements Engineering Board initiated an outstanding initiative in this context: the international part-time training course "Digital Design Professional". With this training course, interested people can be trained and certified as digital design professionals based on an international standard.
More information about the training can be found here: www.digitaldesign.org
A look behind the scenes of the digital design professional has during a BitZips took place. A recording of this event can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R45BaqBK_bk
The journey continues...
A good five years have passed since the beginnings of digital design. The brief outline of the history shows that the initiative has already achieved a lot. But there is still much more work ahead of us. No digital Bauhaus has yet been founded and basic courses in digital design and other new job descriptions of digitization are also still a long way off.
So we continue undaunted. We would like to take a look at the year 2025 today and know what the story of our initiative will look like then.
